Submit the work you
stand behind.

Deadline

15 September 2026, 23:59 UTC

Eligibility

Enrolled in secondary school on the day you submit. A secondary school is an educational institution providing learning for students after primary school and before higher education, typically covering ages 11 to 18.

Length

2,000–8,000 words, excluding footnotes and bibliography

Format

PDF only. Times New Roman, 12 pt, double-spaced, numbered pages. Other file types and typefaces are returned unread.

Citation

Chicago notes-bibliography preferred; MLA, APA, or your discipline’s standard accepted if applied consistently

Language

English. Quotations in other languages should be given in the original with a translation in the notes.

Submission fee

$64.99, payable on submission. Need-based waivers are granted in full on presentation of an existing fee-waiver credential or a note from a school official. What the fee pays for, and how to request a waiver

Fast-track review

An additional $55.00, for a total of $119.99, optional. Decision and both full referee reports within 14 days of your submission, rather than the round’s general decision date. How fast-track works

Publication fee

None. Acceptance never costs anything.

Before you submit, remove from the manuscript itself:

• Your name, from the title page, headers, and footers
• The name of your school, teacher, or supervising programme
• Acknowledgements — add them back after acceptance
• Self-identifying references (“as I argued in my school’s journal…”)
• Document metadata: check File › Properties, and the author field of your PDF export

Your name and school go in the submission form, not the document. The editors see both; the referees see neither.

If your paper is accepted, all of this — your name, your school, and your acknowledgements — is added back for the published version.

An argument, not a survey

The most common reason we decline a paper is that it explains a topic competently without claiming anything about it. A thesis has to be the sort of thing a reasonable person could dispute.

Sources used, not listed

A bibliography of thirty works none of which shaped the argument is worse than six that did. We would rather see close, accurate work on a narrow base of evidence than broad gestures at a literature.

A question you can actually answer

Scope your claim to what your evidence can carry. “Informal land consolidation in one county, 1580–1640” is a paper. “The causes of the English agricultural revolution” is a reading list.

Your own prose

Write it yourself. Using a language model to draft, paraphrase, or generate argument and submitting the result as your own work is grounds for permanent exclusion from the journal. Using one to check spelling is not.

Submission costs $64.99. It buys a reading, not an outcome — the fee is identical whether your paper is accepted or declined, and paying it confers no advantage at any stage of review.

We charge it because the alternative is worse. A journal that cannot pay its referees gets the readings it deserves: hurried, unwritten, or not delivered at all. The fee covers three things.

Referee compensation

Every referee is paid for the hours a serious report takes. This is the largest share, and the reason the reports are worth reading.

Community outreach

Reaching students at schools without research programmes, college counsellors, or anyone to tell them journals like this exist.

Operations

Hosting, archiving, and the work of finding the next cohort of authors and referees.

Waivers

If the fee would stop you submitting, we will waive it in full. Request the waiver before you submit — we will send you a submission link with the fee removed.

1. Write to the editors

   Email us with any one of the following. You do not need more than one, and we never ask for tax returns, bank statements, or any record of your family’s finances.

   • A current fee-waiver code from the College Board, the ACT, or the Common Application
   • A free or reduced-price lunch eligibility letter
   • An email from a teacher, counsellor, or administrator at your school, sent from a school address, confirming the fee is a genuine barrier for you

   The third option always applies. If your school is outside the United States, or issues none of the documents above, any adult at your school who knows your circumstances can write on your behalf.

2. We verify, within three business days

   An editor checks the document and confirms it by email. We do not store financial records, and nothing you send at this stage is kept once the waiver is granted.

3. You receive a submission link with no fee

   The link is issued to you personally and works once. Submit through it exactly as any other author would. From that point your paper is indistinguishable from every other submission.

Allow a week. Because verification happens before submission, request your waiver at least seven days before the deadline. Requests arriving in the final days may not be processed in time.

Waivers are handled entirely apart from review. Nothing about your fee ever reaches a referee, because nothing about you ever reaches a referee.

A journal that only hears from students who can spend sixty-five dollars is not an international journal. The waiver is how we mean that.

Fast-track review adds $55.00 to the standard $64.99 fee, for a total of $119.99. In exchange, you receive your decision and both full referee reports within 14 days of the date you submit — rather than waiting for the round’s general decision date.

This is useful if you submit early in a round and do not want to wait for everyone else’s papers to clear the queue, or if you need a decision by a specific date of your own that falls before the round’s scheduled notifications.

Fast-track compresses our timeline, not our referees’ time with your paper. Because of that, we can only take a limited number of fast-track submissions per round; request it at submission and we will confirm availability by email.

Fast-track review is not eligible for a need-based fee waiver — the tight turnaround already stretches referee and editor time, and we cannot extend that further to accommodate waiver processing. The standard track remains fully waivable; see the waiver process above.