Why I Don’t Like Journal Transfer Services
Over the past years, more and more academic publishers have started offering journal transfer services. The idea sounds convenient enough: your paper gets rejected from one journal, and instead of starting a new submission elsewhere, the publisher offers to transfer your manuscript to another journal in its portfolio. Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, and other large commercial publishers offer variations of this service.
I understand why authors may be tempted. Rejection hurts. Sometimes you have worked on a paper for months, you have polished every paragraph, and you genuinely believe you are submitting a strong piece of work. Then the reviews come back, and the editor rejects it. At that moment, being offered a button that essentially says Would you like us to send this somewhere else? can feel very attractive.
But I think we should resist that temptation.
My main problem with journal transfers is that they encourage us to treat rejection as a logistical problem rather than as part of the academic writing process. If reviewers have taken the time to read your work and point out weaknesses, then there is usually something to learn from those comments. Of course, reviewers are not always right, and sometimes a paper is simply not a good fit for a particular journal. But even then, I think there is value in stopping, reading the reviews carefully, and asking: What can I improve before I submit this paper again?
Simply transferring the exact same manuscript elsewhere skips that step.
And now let me put on my journal editor hat for a moment: I do not want the rejected leftovers from another journal. If you are sending me a manuscript that has already gone through peer review somewhere else, fine. That happens all the time. Rejection is part of academic publishing. But please send me the improved version.
As an editor, I want to see a manuscript that the authors have thought about again. I want them to have considered the reviewers’ comments, strengthened the argument where necessary, clarified confusing sections, improved figures, added missing references, or reconsidered how they position their contribution. I do not want Manuscript Version 1.0 making its way through eleven journals until somebody eventually says yes.
And as an author, I try to follow the same principle. Yes, sometimes I strongly disagree with a rejection. Sometimes I think the reviewers misunderstood the paper. Sometimes I think the manuscript was perfectly good to begin with. It still stings. But once I have had some time to be annoyed about it, I go back to the reviews and see what I can use.
Almost always, there is something.
So, my plea is simple: if your paper gets rejected, do not immediately click the transfer button. Close the email. Be grumpy for a little while if you need to. Then read the reviews again, improve the manuscript, identify the journal that is genuinely the best fit for the revised paper, and submit it there, a few weeks or months later.
Rejection does not have to mean send the same thing somewhere else. It can mean make the paper better.
How do you feel about journal transfer services?
