I will say that I think the “desk reject” in journal publishing is really not well understood by authors. At @SocietyandSpace we get many more papers than we can reasonably publish, and we get a lot of papers that aren’t a great fit. 1/n

“Fit” is not a polite way of saying we just don’t like it, though it does refer to our assessment as to whether the paper aligns with the aims and scope (clearly laid out on the website) of the journal. 2/n

We get a lot of papers that are quality papers that will and should be published somewhere else that we desk reject - when we pass on a paper we are not usually concluding it is not publishable. 3/n

Deciding which papers to send out for review is our only chance to curate our table of contents - once we send a paper out, we are obligated to publish it If it is positively reviewed (it would be unethical and a waste of everyone’s time to do it any other way). 4/n

We also have to balance demands on reviewers’ time - their time is a precious and scarce resource in the publishing process. We cannot send out every thing we get because we would quickly exhaust our potential reviewer pool. 5/n

There are a number of things that make a good @SocietyandSpace paper that are not universal requirements of any good paper - we tend to publish papers that advance social theory through ethical engagement with the actually existing world. 6/n

All good papers do not have to advance social theory of course! But all good Society and Space papers do. So if you receive a desk reject, please consider that it is not a referendum on whether the paper should be published - just whether the journal is the right place for it 7/n

A journal is not and should not be simply a repository of publishable papers submitted to it. A big part of the work we do as editors is to curate the journal - to make it recognizable as “Society and Space.” 8/n

I know desk rejects are frustrating and sting a bit - I just got one myself from a journal I really wanted my piece in - but I knew it meant that the journal eds didn’t think they would be able to get the right reviewers and that my piece wouldn’t find the right audience 9/9.

One more thing: I did not know any of this until I started editing a journal.