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 an independent human. 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. Every appeal is logged in the journal's audit trail with a timestamp. 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.
- Any case in which the journal's founders have a conflict of interest goes to an arbiter fully external to the publisher.
- As the editorial board forms, board members will serve as the standing appeals arbiters — the structural reason the board exists.
The arbiter may re-run 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.