Authors can contest a decision, above all a rejection, and for an AI-assisted pipeline this matters doubly: you are entitled to escalate an AI-influenced decision to a human who took no part in making it. Appeals are always free.
What can be appealed
- A rejection (desk reject or after full review).
- A major-revisions decision the authors believe is procedurally or factually wrong.
- A misconduct finding (handled jointly with the ethics process).
A resubmission of substantially new work is not an appeal; submit it as a new manuscript. An appeal contests the decision on this manuscript.
Grounds: an appeal needs a specific reason
Disagreement with editorial judgement alone is weak. Strong grounds are:
- a factual error in the assessment: a reviewer or assessment misread the method, data or results;
- a procedural error: a step was skipped, the wrong review profile ran, the reproducibility package was mishandled;
- demonstrable bias or a conflict of interest in the decision;
- new information that materially changes the assessment.
How to appeal
Submit a written appeal to contact@fairpressjournals.com, stating the specific ground(s) and the evidence. Appeals reach us by email rather than through the submission system, so the log is one the editors keep by hand and not something the software generates: every appeal is acknowledged, and the appeal, its date and its outcome are recorded with that manuscript's editorial record. The exact deadlines (time to appeal, acknowledgement, decision) are being finalised and will be published on this page; until then, appeals are acknowledged promptly and heard without unnecessary delay.
Who decides: independence is the point
- An appeal is never heard by the editor who signed the contested decision.
- This journal is edited by one of the imprint's two founders, so an appeal here cannot go to "the founders" as a pair standing outside the decision: one of them signed it. We state the rule precisely instead of printing a reassurance that would be untrue. An appeal against a decision of this journal is decided by the founder of FAIR Press Journals who did not sign the decision. That founder is named on the editorial board page.
- The arbiter's remit is to review the process: whether the decision followed the journal's own stated procedure, whether the assessment record supports it, and whether the grounds you raise were addressed — not whether a different subject-matter judgement would have been preferable.
- An arbiter never hears an appeal concerning their own submission. An editor or founder may submit to a FAIR Press Journals title they do not edit; where the arbiter is an author on the submission under appeal, the appeal goes to an arbiter fully external to the publisher — on this journal the only other founder is the editor who signs, so there is no internal fallback and we do not pretend there is.
- Any other case in which every available arbiter has a conflict of interest takes the same external route.
- As the editorial board forms, board members will serve as the standing appeals arbiters: the structural reason the board exists.
The arbiter may rerun relevant parts of the assessment pipeline, consult an additional reviewer, and reviews the full assessment record. The outcome is a brief, reasoned written decision: uphold, overturn (accept or send to revision), or partially uphold. The decision is final for that manuscript: one appeal per decision.
Transparency and protection
- We will publish the appeal rate and the overturn rate alongside our other process metrics once decisions exist to count: real numbers, never projections.
- A pattern of overturns feeds the review engine's calibration: appeals make the process better, which is why we do not discourage them.
- No retaliation: lodging a good-faith appeal never disadvantages the authors in this or future submissions.
Complaints about the journal itself
Complaints about process, conduct or service, as distinct from appeals against a decision, go to the same address, are logged the same way, and are answered by someone independent of the conduct complained about wherever the two-founder structure allows; otherwise we say so and propose an external route.