A place for research that took a detour
Journal of Sidequests is an academic journal for experiments, measurements, simulations, and engineering investigations outside the authors’ everyday work. It welcomes small studies and negative results when the methods and reporting allow readers to evaluate the findings.
What publication involves
An editor screens a submission and invites one independent external reviewer with relevant expertise. The editor makes the acceptance decision and may request revisions. Payment does not influence acceptance.
Accepted work goes through preparation for online publication. Published articles are free to read and have individual article pages with bibliographic details and stable URLs.
Publication fee: $50 USD
We are not currently requesting publication payments while business registrations and payment-account activation are being completed. The stated fee applies after acceptance; an editor may grant an individual waiver.
Submission and peer review are free. We will not request payment until after acceptance. Accepted authors receive a private Stripe invoice identifying their manuscript; no general submission payment or advance deposit is required.
The fee helps cover website hosting, manuscript and article storage, backups, email, payment processing, and ongoing maintenance of the publishing system. Editors may waive the fee for individual articles without changing the review or acceptance standards.
Delivery and identifiers
Publication is delivered online after the accepted manuscript is prepared and approved for publication. The editorial office communicates the next steps and timing with the author. We do not sell a guaranteed acceptance or promise a fixed publication deadline.
We are working toward offering digital object identifiers (DOIs). DOI registration is not yet available. Articles can be cited using their authors, title, publication details, and journal webpage.
Withdrawals and refunds
Authors may withdraw a submission before acceptance without a publication charge. After acceptance and payment, an author-requested withdrawal or change of mind does not normally qualify for a refund. If the journal cannot provide the paid publication service for reasons attributable to us, we refund the publication fee. Billing errors and rights required by law are covered in our customer policies.