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. Until the editorial board stands, an appeal goes to an editor of this journal who did not sign it; where this journal's editors cannot supply one, it is decided by the founders of FAIR Press Journals, who in that case neither edited nor signed the decision under appeal.
- When the founders arbitrate for a journal they do not edit, they review the process: whether the decision followed the journal's own stated procedure, not whether the subject-matter judgement was right.
- An arbiter never hears an appeal concerning their own submission. An editor may submit to a FAIR Press Journals title they do not edit, so where a founder is an author, the other founder arbitrates.
- Any case in which every available arbiter has 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 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.