Every day, I receive too many e-mails. This may be a common problem for everyone who has a professional job. Among them, recommendations to submit manuscripts to medical journals are among the most frequent. Many of these solicitations come from so-called predatory journals, while others come from journals not considered to be predatory that nonetheless have enormous submission fees. We call those journals, which are indexed in Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and have moderate to high impact factors, "for-profit" journals. In general, journals with a good reputation and high level of authority also have high submission fees. However, one must ask: are the actual publication costs of these journals higher than those of other, less famous journals? I don't know, but I doubt it. Some people say that this is due to capitalism—but this is a disgusting phenomenon. At the Korean Journal of Transplantation (KJT), we promise again that we will remain an open-access journal without publishing fees, even if we “succeed.”

Success of academic journals: does it exist? If so, is that the right thing to consider?

Journals may be good or bad, and we probably think we clearly understand the difference between these two types of academic journals. However, we often cannot evaluate whether a journal is “good” based on its contents; instead, we judge a journal according to whether it is indexed in SCIE, PubMed Central (PMC), and Scopus, or based on its impact factor. Therefore, as editors of medical journals, we try to have our journals indexed and evaluated according to this so-called system of objective criteria that indicates the good performance of an academic journal.

KJT will be indexed in PMC starting this July. Are we succeeding? Do we have good articles, and are our efforts to publish good, informative content sufficient? I reflect seriously upon these questions again and again. Thank you.