After a desk rejection: get your paper reviewed

What a desk rejection is, and is not

Before peer review, an editor triages each submission: does it fit the journal's scope and priorities? Many papers stop there. At the American Journal of Public Health, the editors reported that 33% of new submissions are desk rejected because their content is not appropriate for the journal, and wrote that this “has nothing to do with their quality”.

So a desk rejection often says more about the journal than about the paper. What it does not give you is an expert's view of the work.

Editorial triage versus expert review

Triage asks whether a paper belongs in one journal. Review asks whether the work holds up: the methods, the analysis, whether the conclusions follow. Unjournal goes straight to the second question. It reads the paper for the specific points that need an expert, finds the researchers whose own work is closest to them, and asks them.

Two ways to use the reviews

• Revise, then resubmit. Fix what the reviewers found before the next journal sees it. The reviews are yours to act on.
• Publish it now. If at least two reviewers endorse your revision and none says “not yet”, you can publish it as a peer-reviewed preprint, with the reviews, on the Unjournal preprint journal.

Neither guarantees acceptance at a journal. Both give the paper what triage did not: an expert reading.

You keep the copyright, as with any preprint. If you plan to submit the work to a journal later, check that journal's preprint policy before you publish the peer-reviewed preprint.

Reviewers found for the paper

A journal looks for papers that fit it. Here it works the other way round: reviewers are found for the paper, from the global publication record. You approve the anonymized shortlist before anyone is contacted, and the review is double-blind.

How it works

1. Upload the paper (PDF or Word). It is read for the questions that need an expert, and nothing is sent to anyone yet.
2. Approve an anonymized shortlist of researchers whose own work is closest to those questions.
3. They review it double-blind, commenting on the passages that matter.
4. Revise; the same reviewers check the revision against their own comments.
5. Once at least two endorse it and none says “not yet”, you may publish it on the Unjournal preprint journal, with its reviews.