What is a "low threshold" journal in Open Access publishing? - Paper Publishing & Academic Writing Tips for Scientific Researchers

" ... Of greater concern is the potential inversion of the basic economic model for more prestigious journals.  Open Access works great if your overhead (editorial and production costs) can be covered by a high enough acceptance rate to generate sufficient APC revenue. If your journal has a very low acceptance rate (around 10%), your interest in the Open Access model is likely to be limited given the low APC revenue that could be anticipated ... Since prestigious journals have no economic incentive to embrace the Open Access model without, from their perspective, lowering standards by increasing the acceptance rate, researchers who seek to balance the cachet of publication in such journals with their social commitment to greater access to their research, have begun to experiment with a hybrid model, by which authors can pay an APC to have their specific article released as Open Access even as the rest of the journal content remains secure behind a subscription pay wall ... In the past, the more esoteric academic journals have been punished with higher subscription prices to reflect low readership numbers – those overhead costs have to be covered. Under the open access model, low threshold journals have been developed where higher acceptance rates generate higher APC revenue to support the funding of more selective journals without having to punish the authors in those selective journals with higher APC’s to cover overhead. Critics, inevitably, have dismissed these lower threshold journals as being of correspondingly lower quality since the acceptance rates have to be higher to make the math work. Advocates, on the other hand, argue that there is strong evidence that the high rejection rates of prestigious journals are nothing more than unilateral cut-offs for the number of articles the journal is willing to print, which implies that many of the articles that don’t make that cut-off are of perfectly good academic quality and deserve to find an audience elsewhere ..."