ORBIT reads your abstract, works out its subject areas, and matches them against about 98,000 journals — showing what each one costs to publish in, whether it is open access and independently listed, and how much it published last year. Journals that have stopped publishing are never suggested. The whole tool is free and takes no credit.
Journal quartiles come from Scopus and Web of Science, and impact factors come from Clarivate. All three are licensed commercial datasets. ORBIT sells credits, so republishing that data without a licence is not something this site will do — even when a file happens to be freely downloadable, which is not the same as being freely reusable.
What ORBIT shows instead is open data an author can check for themselves: the real publication fee, DOAJ listing, membership of the CWTS Leiden core sources list, the country and publisher, how much the journal publishes, and an ORBIT Tier calculated by us. The tier ranks a journal against others in its own field, because a citation rate that is exceptional in history is unremarkable in molecular biology — a single global ranking would sort by discipline and call the result quality.
ORBIT can suggest from about 98,000 journals because a suggestion needs only public metadata about what a journal has published. It can format to, and run a readiness check against, a much smaller set — the journals whose submission rules a human has verified against the publisher's own page.
Suggestions carry an ORBIT-ready badge where both are true. A journal without the badge can still be exactly the right choice; ORBIT simply cannot format or check against it yet, and says so rather than implying a coverage it does not have.
It is classified into subject areas and then discarded. ORBIT stores only the subjects that came back, keyed by a one-way hash of the text, so that running the same abstract again is instant and costs nothing. The abstract itself is never written to the database and the stored row carries no user id.
That is deliberate. An unpublished abstract is the most sensitive document this site handles, and a record of what researchers are working on before they publish is not something ORBIT has any business keeping.
Because we are not licensed to. Journal quartiles come from Scopus and Web of Science, which are commercial databases owned by Elsevier and Clarivate, and impact factors are Clarivate's. Those datasets are licensed, and ORBIT sells credits — so republishing them inside a paid product without a licence is not something we are willing to do, even where a file happens to be downloadable. What ORBIT shows instead is open data: the CWTS Leiden core list, DOAJ listing, the real publication fee, how much a journal publishes, and our own field-relative tier. Any tool showing you a quartile is either licensed for it or should not be.
Usually not, and the page marks which ones it can. ORBIT can suggest from about 98,000 journals because a suggestion only needs public metadata about what a journal publishes. It can format to, and readiness-check against, a much smaller set — the journals whose submission rules a human has verified against the publisher's own page. Suggestions carry an ORBIT-ready badge where both are true. A journal does not become formattable by being popular, and we would rather show you the honest gap than quietly imply a coverage we do not have.
No, and this is the distinction most likely to cost you money. ORBIT reports three states: a fee of a stated amount, a fee stated as zero, and no fee published. Only the second means free to publish. The third — which is roughly a third of journals — means nobody has recorded a figure, and that covers everything from genuinely free journals to subscription journals to ones that simply never published their price. ORBIT will not colour a blank field as free. Where it matters, check on the journal's own site before you submit.
No. Nothing on this page is an acceptance rate, because journals do not publish them openly and a number invented for that would be the most misleading thing we could put on the screen. The match percentage says how much of what a journal publishes is in your subject, worked out from its actual published output. The Reach / Match / Safe bands compare journals within your own shortlist by citation impact and how much they publish. Both describe the journal. Neither predicts a decision made by an editor who has read your paper.
It is classified into subject areas and then not kept. ORBIT stores the subjects that came back, keyed by a one-way hash of the text, so that running the same abstract again is instant and costs nothing — but the abstract itself is never written to the database and the stored row carries no user id, so it cannot be traced back to you or reassembled. That is deliberate: an unpublished abstract is the most sensitive document this site ever handles, and a record of what researchers are working on before they publish is not something ORBIT has any business keeping.
It is built from OpenAlex, an openly licensed catalogue of the scholarly record, and rebuilt periodically — the page states the date of the build it is using. It covers journals that have an ISSN and have actually published recently, which is a deliberate safety filter: a journal that has stopped publishing will not be suggested to you, because finding that out yourself costs months. Every field shown comes from that open data, and the page names what it does not have as plainly as what it does.