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Call for Papers

Issue 2: Open Call

Submissions are currently open. There is no themed restriction for this issue — original, evidence-grounded, rigorously argued work is welcome across the categories below.

Submission window: rolling. No fixed deadline for this call; accepted manuscripts will be scheduled into Issue 2 as they clear review.

Categories

The scope below reflects where the journal's own editorial expertise currently sits — not a hard boundary. If your work doesn't fit neatly into one of these, submit it anyway with a note on where you think it fits. See current reviewers below for who reads each category.

Public Policy

Program evaluation, policy analysis, and government accountability research.

Economics

Applied economics, tax policy, and empirical economic analysis.

Political Economy

The politics of policy persistence, institutional incentives, and collective action.

Public Finance

Government budgeting, tax policy design, and public capital allocation.

Entrepreneurship

Founder- and investor-informed review of new venture strategy, growth, and failure.

Research Methodology

Quasi-experimental design, program evaluation methods, and meta-science.

Workplace Learning & Organizational Development

Employee development, org design, and workplace learning strategy.

Other

Original, rigorous work outside the above is still welcome — note your fit in the submission.

Current Reviewers

Undeterred Press is a young journal, and this roster is intentionally small right now. It will grow as the journal does.

Economics · Research Methodology

Kevin A. Schulte, Ph.D. — Founding Editor. Graduate-level teaching in economics and research methods.

Public Policy · Political Economy

Kevin A. Schulte, Ph.D. — Ph.D. in Public Policy Analysis with a specialty in analytics; doctoral research applied quasi-experimental evaluation methods to state angel-investor tax-credit programs.

Public Finance

Kevin A. Schulte, Ph.D. — 18 graduate hours in finance, the standard threshold for university-level teaching in the subject.

Entrepreneurship

Kevin A. Schulte, Ph.D. — five companies founded, angel investments in ten companies, and four years directing Saint Louis University's Entrepreneurship Center.

Workplace Learning & Organizational Development

Ann E. Schulte, Ed.D. — subject-matter reviewer. Former Chief Learning Officer at Mastercard and Procter & Gamble, leading award-winning talent development initiatives at both. Since retiring from P&G in 2024, she advises on talent enablement, organizational capabilities, and culture, and serves as academic director and faculty in the executive doctoral program for organizational learning at the University of Pennsylvania.

If you have relevant domain expertise and would consider reviewing for this journal, we'd like to hear from you.

What We're Looking For

The standard is intellectual: original, evidence-grounded, rigorously argued work, regardless of field, institutional affiliation, or the method by which the prose was produced. No requirement of institutional affiliation. No requirement of native English fluency. No requirement that AI tools were or weren't used — only that their use is fully disclosed.

AI Disclosure

Every submission must include a disclosure statement at one of three levels.

Level 1

No AI involvement. Argument, evidence, and prose are entirely human-generated, start to finish.

Level 2

AI-assisted. AI assisted research, organization, or drafting, with substantial human authorship. Findings and core analysis remain human-originated and independently verified.

Level 3

AI-primary drafting. AI-primary drafting, with human direction throughout. The author verifies every claim and holds full intellectual responsibility for the result.

Most publishers — including open-review platforms built for speed — restrict AI to light editing and treat content generation as outside their authorship rules. Level 3 is accepted here, not because the accountability question doesn't matter, but because full disclosure plus author responsibility for every claim is our answer to it.

Scope Limitation

Undeterred Press does not accept content where an erroneous claim could lead to direct physical, financial, or security harm, and where our review process — a small, non-specialist editorial team — isn't equipped to catch a dangerous mistake the way a licensed professional body would. This isn't a judgment about whether these fields matter; it's a plain limit on what a single-editor outlet can responsibly vet.

Specifically excluded:

  • Clinical, diagnostic, or treatment-efficacy content — medical, pharmacological, or otherwise. Health policy and health-economics research remain in scope; treatment and diagnostic claims do not.
  • Physical-safety engineering — structural, civil, aerospace, electrical, or industrial-process design where a calculation error could cause physical failure.
  • Food, water, or chemical safety specifics — contamination thresholds, hazmat handling, and similar operational safety detail.
  • Actionable legal or compliance instructions — analysis of law and regulation is in scope; step-by-step guidance meant to substitute for a licensed attorney is not.
  • Personalized financial or investment guidance — policy and economic analysis is in scope (see our own founding article); telling a specific reader how to allocate their money is not.
  • Cybersecurity exploit detail or attack methodology — policy and governance analysis of cybersecurity is in scope; functional exploit code or attack instructions are not.
  • Critical infrastructure operational specifics — detailed operational information about power grids, water systems, or similar, where the main use of the detail would be causing harm rather than informing policy discussion.

If a submission sits near one of these lines, we'd rather discuss it directly than guess — reach out before submitting.

Review Process

Submission → editorial triage for completeness and fit → single rigorous review round → publication with full disclosure attached. Typically 18 days on average from submission to decision, depending on revision needs and response time.

The triage step is AI-assisted: an initial pass checks category fit, completeness, and flags anything that needs a closer look, and produces a brief for the reviewer. The AI does not make editorial decisions. The subject-matter reviewer reads the full submission independently and is the sole authority on accept, revise, or reject. Full detail: Quality Assurance Statement.

A rejected submission may be appealed once, on the basis of a specific claimed error in the review rather than general disagreement. Appeals get an independent second read. Full detail: Review Workflow.

After Publication

Worth being direct about this too: Undeterred Press doesn't yet have a large distribution engine, a mailing list of thousands, or a marketing team. What we do is real but modest — every published piece is shared through our own professional networks and cross-listed on SSRN, a widely used open research repository, and we actively encourage authors to do the same through their own networks, since a citable, permanent piece is worth pointing people to. Growing real reach and indexing (see Copyright, Licensing & Preservation) remains an active priority beyond that. We'd rather tell you plainly where visibility stands today than promise a marketing engine we don't have yet.

Questions

For anything not covered here — fit, scope, category, or anything else — reach the editorial office directly: editor@undeterredpress.com.

Ready to submit? The form asks for your manuscript, an abstract, your AI disclosure level, and category.

Submit Your Manuscript