IIER Editorial 35(3): (i) About being "...unable to consider any new submissions..." (ii) Miscellanea

Roger Atkinson and Clare McBeath
IIER Co-Editors, Australia

(i) About being "...unable to consider any new submissions..."

Thank you for the interest in IIER. We acknowledge your submission to IIER dated [date]. We have logged your submission (#xxx), but we regret to inform you that we are unable to consider any new submissions made during August 2025 and possibly September also.

The "triggers" for this drastic and deeply regrettable action are the recent increases in IIER's monthly submission rate, and emergence of longer delays between submission, acceptance and publication. During January-July 2025 IIER has averaged 72.6 submissions per month, with the most stressful months being June (82 subs) and July (110 subs). Submissions already in our review queue have filled 35(3) (due end September 2025), will fill 35(4) (December 2025), and October to December submissions are likely to overfill 36(1) in 2026, despite this August-September 2025 slowdown. Regrettably, we have encountered slow progress in replenishing our numbers of Associate Editors, diminished by recent retirements.

Editorial 35(2) (http://www.iier.org.au/iier35/editorial35-2.html) provides statistics for IIER submissions and review outcomes. Editorial 35(3) (due at or near end September) will provide an update and advice on our resumption of consideration of new submissions.

We wish you all the best for a successful continuation of your research.

The phrase "We have logged your submission..." is important. Firstly, we expect some of the logged articles will be submitted again in October or later. As a routine matter, we will be searching the current year and perhaps the previous year also, to ascertain whether a submission is wholly new or a resubmission. Secondly, our logging has identified a very small number of outstanding articles that have been offered positions in a "wait list" for IIER 36(1) (March 2026) or 36(2) (June 2026). It must be noted that these offers are subject to further, formal review, and that owing to time constraints the identifying of outstanding articles could be regarded as incomplete.

We are acutely aware that for many or even most, "Please send your article to another journal." will be a depressing, perhaps demoralising directive. For some of or even many of IIER's prospective authors, IIER was a "first and best choice" (again, the evidence is subjective and anecdotal). The main reasons are the absence of an article publishing charge (APC), open access publishing, valuable formative advice, highly supportive copy editing, IIER's perceived high status (Scopus Q2), IIER's 'generalist' character, and the encouragement derived from finding that colleagues or fellow nationals have succeeded with their IIER submissions (IIER could be equally-well open to me/us!).

Of these main reasons, the only one to be much weakened to date is "valuable formative advice", in the case of declined submissions (accepted submissions do receive formative advice, usually very extensive). To illustrate, here is an excerpt from a template used for January to July 2025 (i.e. prior to IIER's "unable to consider any new submissions" period, August to September 2025; the template was updated monthly - below is the version that was used for the early August 2025 period during when July submission processing was concluded).

After a careful consideration of your article submitted on [insert day, month, year], [insert article title], we regret to advise that we decline to accept it for IIER publication.

We regret that due to the emergence of a backlog in IIER's review process, we have temporarily suspended our providing of the formative advice from IIER editorial staff that usually accompanies IIER's "initial assessment" advice. The backlog is due to continuing high rates of submission (http://www.iier.org.au/iier35/editorial35-2.html), and some recent retirements of associate editors. During Jan-Dec 2024, IIER averaged 67.5 submissions per month. To date in 2025 IIER has received 64 in January, 45 in February, 66 in March, 72 in April, 68 in May, 82 in June, and 110 in July (averaging 72.6 per month).

In time, we will resume the usual provision of formative advice under the heading "IIER editorial staff comments". We are very aware of the value of advice on reasons for declining a submission, and suggestions on how to attain an acceptable standard for publication in an international journal. However, resumption may take some months, owing to the current high rate of submission of articles and the problem of long queues waiting for responses. We also apologise for current delays in our initial review process. [delete last sentence if we are in accord with the review time commitment made in http://www.iier.org.au/iier-submissions.html]

We wish you all the best for a successful continuation of your research. [insert Duty Co-editor signature file]

IIER editorial staff notes
[insert an appropriate brief selection from templates, edit to customise - usually focused on reasons for rejection rather than advice on how to improve; may omit].

-	we are currently very limited in the extent to which we can cater for specialised [insert education sector] such as...
-	we are currently very limited in the extent to which we can cater for topics that have been well-represented in IIER and the international literature generally.
-	we are currently very limited in the extent to which we can cater for specialised topics that could be better placed in another category of journal. This is the case with submission #xxx for which we suggest a journal in [name field of research or discipline of study].

The phrase "In time, we will resume the usual provision of formative advice..." may be changed into a sentence like, "We will endeavour to provide formative advice accompanying all rejection notices, though it may often be brief and confined to a few 'main points to note'...". This is a 'work in progress', particularly for the cases of authors who wish to work towards a resubmission. For such cases, we will need to compose advice to indicate that 'responding to "main points to note" is very necessary, but is not sufficient'; 'you will have to improve on points not noted in this advice'; etc. For all prospective authors, we will have to indicate that for a number of months into the future, IIER's acceptance rate will have to fall substantially lower than the 10 to 12% sustained during 2019 to 2024, and 9.4% estimated for January to August 2025.

We will try to increase the dissemination of IIER advice that has been in use for some years, seeking to promote a critical self-assessment of proposed submissions, informed by extensive reading. The current template is:

We recommend self-assessing the quality of a proposed submission. The best method is to search IIER (see http://www.iier.org.au/about/iier-search.html) using keywords that are relevant for your article. The main question will be, "Can I do as well as, or perhaps even better than, similar articles already published in IIER?" Another important question will be, "Is my topic, country context, research question, or some other aspect under-represented in IIER?"

-	avoid an extension of the "...unable to consider any new submissions..." period, even though the successor period is forecasting "...acceptance rate will have to fall substantially lower";
-	provide the quickest possible rejection advice (enabling the authors to commence promptly on a task that very likely is quite difficult, "send your article to another journal";
-	as time and staffing resources permit, work towards always having two associate editors undertake independent initial readings of each new submission (a 'load sharing', which will also assist in the resumption of at least a minimal or modest amount of formative feedback on rejected articles - as forecast above, such "resumption may take some months").

To summarise, IIER's resumption of consideration of new submissions to occur on 1 October will be subject to severe constraints. The resumption cannot be characterised as a return to "normal", or a "new normal". It's very much a work in progress, so we cannot end with more usual (and hoped for) phrases such as "To conclude..." or "In conclusion...". There are many other issues for Issues underlying "being ... unable to consider any new submissions...", but as our deadline for 35(3) is very near, discussion of these 'many other issues' has to be deferred until IIER 35(4) in early to mid-December 2025, or obtained from previous Editorials given at [http://www.iier.org.au/about/iier-contents-editorials.html].

(ii) Miscellanea

Competing to recruit Associate Editors
As noted above, we have encountered slow progress in replenishing our numbers of Associate Editors. Unfortunately, a small scale journal such as IIER cannot readily compete for attention in the way that a larger scale journal such as Routledge's Cogent Education [https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/oaed20] can display (Figure 1), though IIER is offering the same "rewarding opportunity to give back to your profession..." IIER is also the same as Cogent Education in offering only honorary Associate Editor positions (no payment to you for your time spent on journal work).

Figure 1: Cogent Education's Associate Editor invitation (viewed 18 Sep 2025). The link under "Apply" is:
[https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/editor_recruitment/associate-editors-needed-for-cogent-education/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=EmailStudio&utm_campaign=Editor+Recruitment+TEST+DM+DEV5_5219846&utm_id=]

However, there is a very distinctive difference in our ways of responding to escalating numbers of submissions. The "cards" IIER can "play" are outlined above in (i), but these are minor compared with Cogent Education's APC "card" [emphases added]:

The standard article publishing charge (APC) for this journal is $2,195/ £1,756/ EUR2,110/ AUD3,060, plus VAT or other local taxes where applicable in your country. ...

Our thoughts on "Competing to recruit Associate Editors" have to be moderated by an aligning with 'mainstreaming' as outlined above. Aiming towards a very large scale community of practice constituted by the world's educational researchers is likely to be best served by a highly diverse academic publishing community. We can anticipate high diversity as an effective way to promote innovation, the changing of mindsets about academic publishing, a substantial broadening of participation in research activity and research publication (including Dr Huyen Phuong's "global South"), and new understandings about the driving forces underlying research and research publishing.

One aspect of creating diversity is encouraging every size of publisher, from small scale (like IIER) to mega scale (like Routledge and T&F, Elsevier, Springer, Sage, etc.). As to many other aspects of the desirability of high diversity in the academic publishing community - held over to Editorial 35(4). Deadlines rule!

Some feedback on IIER's January to July 2025 rejection template
A small proportion of IIER's reject notices create feedback from authors. Here is a small but representative sample of excerpts from feedback received in July 2025 (see (i) above for the template used for January to July 2025, i.e. prior to IIER's "unable to consider any new submissions" period, August to September 2025):

-	Thank you very much for taking the time to review our manuscript (Submission #xxx) and for your kind feedback regarding its quality (28jul25);
-	Thank you very much for your reply. I hope my manuscript will be considered in IIER in the future   (28jul25);
-	Thank you for the information, and good luck for IIER   (28jul25);
-	Thank you very much   (8jul25);
-	I confirm receiving the update   (8jul25);
-	Thank you for your mail. The decision is disappointing for us, but that is all part and parcel of scholarly publishing (27jun25);
-	Thank you for the reply. I am sorry that my work could not be considered but appreciate your honesty and quick response (10jul25);
-	Thank you sincerely for taking the time to review my submission. Although my paper was not selected for publication this time, I am truly grateful for the opportunity to participate (12jul25)
-	Thank you for informing me   (8jul25);(14jul25);
-	[no text, just an expressive emoticon]

Note that for Editorial 35(3) references are provided only in the form of in-text web addresses.