#submissionfees — Public Fediverse posts

Submission Fees Are Coming: There Are Better Alternatives

Journal submission fees are coming to organization and management research. California Management Review has just announced that it introduces submission fees of $75 to $150 per article submitted. Paying this fee is the precondition for even being considered for peer review, yet your article might still get desk rejected. The reason stated for this move is of course even higher submission numbers due to AI.

While submission fees are common in neighbouring disciplines such Economics, I still think they are a very bad idea: scholars from well-funded institutions (mostly situated in the Global North) won’t be affected but other scholars will be. It deepens the already enormous gulf in academic opportunity between well-funded and less well-funded research institutions, which is amplified by the self-reinforcing feedback loop of publication output and third-party funding input.

While submission fees might seem like a necessary fix to ever-increasing submission numbers outpacing reviewing capacities, there are alternative measures that could be taken:

• Per-author submission caps: journals could introduce a maximum of, for example, two active manuscripts or two submissions per year. This is a measure already tested by Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory since July 1 of this year.
• “Review before you submit” or journal peer-review credits: mandatory reviewing before submission would be a twofer, increasing the pool of reviewers while also reducing the number of submissions.
• Pitch-based two-step submission process: rather than processing full papers some journals (e.g., Journal of Management in its Special Calls for Qualitative Research Proposals) first require an extended abstract or short paper, with editors only inviting promising and in-scope manuscripts to proceed.

These are just three ad hoc measures that could be quite easily adopted and also combined with each other (see also Hanneke et al. (2026) for more). Addressing structural issues such as the problem of rewarding quantity over quality in academic evaluation or reducing inequality in reviewing loads by cross-journal reviewing limits would probably help even more, but these are no immediate solutions.

So, to all of you with editorial roles in the field of management and organization studies who are considering the introduction of submission fees: please first explore alternatives that do not further exacerbate the already significant social inequalities prevalent in contemporary academia.

This is why #writers hate #submissionfees, and why they hate #literary #magazines #litmags. And #editors. And the whole darn literary business. Just sayin': https://litmagnews.substack.com/p/showcase-magazine-ephemera-c-and