Submissions ≠ Good News
Publishers brag about their submission growth, not factoring in the yield
The following quotes were presented as if they were good news in the most recent edition of Clarke & Esposito’s The Brief:
- “The publisher reports submission growth to the portfolio of a staggering 20%” — Elsevier
- “They reported even more stunning submission growth of 30%” — Springer Nature
- “The British publisher reports submission growth of over 20%.” — Informa
In addition to these reports, Wiley portrays a decline in their projected submission pace as a risk, according to their 2026 annual report.
The hard truth is that most of today’s excess submissions are going to be rejected because they aren’t real or good papers — they are AI slop, paper mill outputs, AI data drek, and/or simply bad papers. According to Lucey’s Law, we can assume 30% don’t deserve to be published at all. Because of the world today and the amount of noise hitting submission systems, that number will probably be much higher.
Want proof? Elena Vicario, PhD, director of research integrity at Frontiers, told MedPage Today the research integrity team there has rejected “more than 12,000 submissions based on simple queries of public datasets, including over 3,000 NHANES-based submissions” in the past year.