Is IEEE Access a Good Journal? JIF, Scope & Fit Guide

This is the question most people are really asking when they search "is IEEE Access a good journal." So here's the direct answer: No, IEEE Access is not predatory.

IEEE is one of the largest and oldest engineering professional societies in the world, with over 400,000 members. IEEE Access uses a structured editorial process: submission requirements check, integrity check, scope-and-quality review, associate editor assignment, and at least two independent peer reviews. The process is real.

So why does the question keep coming up? Three reasons:

1. High acceptance rate. At 27%, IEEE Access accepts more than twice the rate of most IEEE Transactions journals. That creates a perception gap.
2. Large publication volume. IEEE Access publishes thousands of papers per year. Volume and quality aren't the same thing, but volume does dilute individual paper visibility.
3. MDPI comparisons. The broad-scope, high-volume, APC-funded model looks superficially similar to MDPI journals, which face their own reputation questions. The difference is institutional backing: IEEE has decades of editorial infrastructure that MDPI doesn't.

The perception problem is real even though the predatory label is wrong. Some hiring committees and grant reviewers treat high-volume OA journals with skepticism regardless of publisher. That's a career consideration, not a quality one.

IEEE Access works best for:

• Interdisciplinary engineering work that doesn't fit neatly into one Transactions journal. A machine learning application to power grid optimization might struggle in both IEEE Trans. on ML and IEEE Trans. on Power Systems but fits naturally in IEEE Access.
• Solid incremental contributions with proper validation. If your paper improves on existing methods by 3-5% with rigorous benchmarking, that's exactly what sound-methodology review is designed for.
• Time-sensitive work where 21-day review and fast publication matter. Conference extensions, engineering applications with near-term deployment, and results that lose value if they sit in review for 8 months.
• Survey papers with real synthesis. Not literature lists, but papers that organize a field, identify gaps, and provide analytical value.

Here's the honest career framing most journal guides won't give you:

For early-career researchers building a publication record, IEEE Access provides a legitimate IEEE publication credit with fast turnaround. One IEEE Access paper alongside IEEE Transactions papers shows productivity and breadth.

For mid-career researchers, IEEE Access works for incremental contributions and interdisciplinary work that doesn't justify the 6-month review cycle at a Transactions journal.

For tenure-track faculty at research-intensive universities, a publication record dominated by IEEE Access papers (and no Transactions papers) will raise questions. The journal is a complement to higher-tier venues, not a replacement.

The $2,160 APC is still in the mainstream open-access range and remains cheaper than Scientific Reports ($2,850) and comparable to PLOS ONE ($2,477). Most engineering grants can absorb it, but the cost is high enough that authors should be honest about whether speed and IEEE Xplore visibility are worth the trade.

In our pre-submission review work with manuscripts targeting IEEE Access, three patterns generate the most consistent desk rejections among the papers we analyze.

Misclassified article type creating editorial friction before review. IEEE Access has 18 defined article types, each with editorial expectations stated in the submission guidelines. We see authors label a descriptive literature overview as a "Survey" when it lacks a systematic inclusion/exclusion framework and draws no synthesis conclusion from the body of work. The guidelines state that a Survey "should use a clear framework for selecting and excluding papers and should draw an overall conclusion." Papers that do not meet their stated type criteria are returned at the editorial stage, not after peer review, which wastes the 21-day turnaround advantage.

Validation that uses outdated or self-selected baselines. IEEE Access's sound-methodology model is often misread as a low-bar model. We observe that reviewers at IEEE Access scrutinize baselines precisely because the journal's acceptance rate (27%) is publicly questioned. Papers that compare a proposed approach only against the authors' prior work, or against methods from 3+ years ago without justification, are rejected for insufficient experimental rigor regardless of the approach's real-world merit. The baseline selection needs to include current SOTA from open repositories.

Interdisciplinary scope framing that does not explain why IEEE Access specifically. We see papers that describe themselves as interdisciplinary as a strategy for avoiding specialist review, rather than because the work genuinely spans multiple IEEE fields. Reviewers familiar with the journal's positioning notice this. The cover letter and abstract must make the case for why a single IEEE Transactions title cannot serve the paper's technical community, not just assert that the work is broad.

SciRev author-reported data confirms IEEE Access's 21-day median to first decision. A IEEE Access scope and readiness check can assess whether your article type, validation approach, and scope framing will survive the initial editorial check before you upload to IEEE ScholarOne.