We do not send unsolicited journal invitations asking researchers for manuscripts, because we are paid only if a manuscript is accepted after peer review. A rejected submission earns us nothing. A publisher paid at submission earns from every email that produces a submission, accepted or not. A publisher's own fee terms say which model it uses, or conspicuously fail to.
Mass solicitation would therefore be a pure cost to us. What follows is that incentive as a table you can apply to any publisher, the checks that show where a publisher takes its money, and a script for declining.
What unsolicited journal invitations are, and why they arrive in bulk
An unsolicited journal invitation is an email asking you to submit a manuscript to a journal you have had no prior contact with, quoting the title of one of your published papers and offering a quick decision, a special issue slot or a discount that expires.
These emails arrive in bulk because sending them costs almost nothing. Corresponding author addresses are printed on the article itself and repeated in the full-text XML that open-access publishers distribute, so they can be harvested in bulk by a script. What decides whether a publisher sends a hundred thousand of them is what one extra manuscript is worth to it.
That figure depends on one variable: when the publisher gets paid.
The incentive table: what a publisher earns from a manuscript it rejects
Ask one question of any publisher, including this one: what does it earn from a manuscript it turns down? The answer sets the rest of the row.
| Payment point | Earned from a rejected manuscript | What that makes rational | Solicitation behaviour it produces |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fee due only on formal acceptance after peer review (our terms) | Nothing. The review effort is spent and never recovered | Attract work likely to survive review; reject freely, since a rejection pays the same as no paper at all | Little reason to cold-email. Every unsuitable manuscript drawn in is a loss |
| Non-refundable submission or handling fee, charged before review | The full fee, whatever the outcome | Maximise the number of submissions; quality changes the workload, not the income | Mass cold email. Broad scope, flattering wording, high volume, repeated follow-ups |
| Submission fee and a further fee on acceptance | The submission fee | Maximise submissions and accept generously, because both stages pay | Mass cold email plus promises of a decision in days and rolling special issues |
| No author-facing fee at all (subscription or diamond open access) | Nothing, and the review cost falls on a library or institutional subsidy | Protect selectivity, because every extra manuscript is a cost with no matching income | Solicitation limited to commissioned pieces from named specialists |
The table is not a judgement about anyone's honesty; it describes what each payment point rewards. A publisher paid before review can behave well, and a publisher paid on acceptance can behave badly. The useful point is narrower: cold solicitation is a cost to a publisher paid on acceptance and a revenue line for a publisher paid at submission. You can tell which you are dealing with without knowing its reputation.
How to find any publisher's payment point in ten minutes
The payment point is a published fact, not an opinion. Every check below runs on the publisher's own pages.
- Open the fees, charges or author payment page. If no such page exists, that absence is the finding.
- Look for a fee attached to the act of submitting rather than to acceptance, and note whether it is called non-refundable.
- Read the refund terms. A publisher paid on acceptance has nothing to refund on rejection, because nothing was taken.
- Check when the amount is disclosed. Some publishers print a figure; others, including us, quote the applicable charge on request and before acceptance. Either is published terms. A charge that appears for the first time in the acceptance email is not.
- Compare the fee page with the invitation email. A discount offered without naming the underlying charge is a price you have not been shown.
- Paste one of the journal's DOIs into Crossref Metadata Search to confirm its articles are registered, and test any ethics claim against the COPE Core Practices the publisher cites.
Wording that signals payment before review
Phrases worth pausing on: submission fee, handling fee, processing fee payable on submission, non-refundable administrative charge, fast-track fee. None is proof of bad faith on its own. Each means the publisher is paid whether or not your manuscript is accepted, which is the condition that makes soliciting strangers profitable.
What our own fee terms say, and the policy we have not published
Submission to Directive Publications is free. An article processing charge falls due only if a manuscript is formally accepted after double-blind peer review, and if the manuscript is rejected nothing is owed. The applicable charge is quoted on request and communicated before acceptance. Invoicing at acceptance is ordinary practice and not a warning sign in itself; what matters is that no money changes hands before the editorial decision. Three waiver routes exist, and requests are handled administratively, separately from editorial evaluation. The terms are on Publication Charges and Fee Waivers & Discounts, and the process they attach to is set out on Peer Review.
Two limits, stated plainly.
First, we have no published policy page saying we do not solicit manuscripts. The commitment is made here, on the blog; what you can verify independently is the fee terms, which are published. Treat the incentive argument as the evidence and our word as secondary, which is the right order for any publisher you assess, this one included.
Second, this post concerns one behaviour: cold-emailing researchers to ask for manuscripts. We are not claiming that no email of any kind has ever left this publisher, only that unsolicited manuscript solicitation is not how work reaches us and that our payment point gives us nothing to gain from it. Manuscripts arrive by email to the editorial office, from authors who chose the journal themselves.
A script to decline an unsolicited journal invitation and report it
Replying confirms the address is live, so send something only when you want a written record: when the email names you as an editor, reviewer or guest editor you never agreed to be, or when it has already reached you more than once.
Subject: Please remove my address and any use of my name
Thank you for your message. I did not request contact from your journal and I am declining the invitation.
Please remove my email address from your mailing lists and confirm in writing that you have done so.
If my name, affiliation or published work appears anywhere on your website, in a board listing, a reviewer list or a call for papers, please remove it and confirm the removal. I have not consented to that use.
I am copying my institution's research office for their records. Please send no further correspondence.
[Name, affiliation, ORCID iD]
Then report it where it counts:
- Your institution's library or research office, which records approaches made to its staff.
- The editorial office of the real journal, if the email appears to imitate a journal you recognise. Use the contact address on that journal's own site, never the one in the email.
- Your email provider's phishing report, if the message asks for payment details or account credentials.
- The organisation named in any membership claim, so the claim can be checked against its member list.
Keep the original email with its full headers; if your name is being used without consent, it is the evidence.
A rule for the invitations that keep arriving
Once your address is in circulation, unsolicited journal invitations arrive in numbers. A rule beats case-by-case judgement, which is exactly what the volume is designed to exhaust.
- Did you go looking for this journal, or did it come looking for you? The second group starts at zero.
- Where is the money taken, at submission or at acceptance? Find the answer on the publisher's own fee page inside two minutes, or stop.
- Does the scope match your paper in specific terms rather than a field name? A genuinely targeted invitation can say why your work fits.
- Does the email claim a metric, a badge or an index? Verify each claim at the body that owns it, never on the publisher's own site.
- If any step fails, archive without replying. If your name is being used, send the script above.
None of that asks you to decide whether a publisher is honest. It asks you to read fee terms it has already written down.
Our terms sit on Publication Charges, the waiver routes on Fee Waivers & Discounts and the review process on Peer Review. If you are weighing an invitation now, read How to Identify a Predatory Journal beside this post, check any metric it quotes against Impact Factor, CiteScore and h-index, and if you are choosing where to send the paper yourself, How to Choose the Right Journal sets out what to check first.