I was a meeting this morning about other things during the course of which I found out that, as of 2025, the Open Journal of Astrophysics is a Q1 journal. This means that according to certain bibliometric criteria, OJAp is in the first quartile (i.e. top 25%) of journals in its field. You can find a table with all journals in Astronomy and Astrophysics curated by SCImago here. I searched the list for all the journals that are classified as Diamond Open Access and found that we’re the only one:
As with many of these bibliometric things the data are incorrect. We actually published 212 papers in 2025. The number of citations is wildly wrong too – the true figure is much higher. I presume that the number of documents (3 years) is 2022+2023+2024, which is the correct number if that’s what it is meant to represent.
My main objection to journal indicators like this (apart from the fact that they’re usually riddled with errors) is that nowadays it is quite easy to extract citation information at the article level so there’s no reason to use a metric associated with the journal to judge the quality of a paper. It’s like judging a book by its cover. I hate Journal Impact Factor for similar reasons; see posts here.
For this reason I don’t personally care at all about whether OJAp is Q1 or Q2 or whatever. I do recognize, however, that many astronomers and astrophysicists work in countries where the funding agencies do not count papers unless they are in Q1 journals. I think that’s silly, but it’s a fact of life.
If the only reason you were not submitting papers to OJAp was that it wasn’t a Q1 journal then you can start submitting them now!
