Whether you are a seasoned researcher with pages of publications in your CV, or thinking about submitting your first article as corresponding author, you may have wondered how the publication process at a journal works. We sat down with Ellen Fox, PhD, the Senior Managing Editor at AAI, to find out what happens behind the scenes at The Journal of Immunology (The JI) and ImmunoHorizons (IH).
So you’ve written an article…
The first thing to consider once you’ve done your research and written your article is to determine where to submit it. Identifying the right journal is a crucial step that can increase the chances of both acceptance and getting read by the right audience. JANE, the Journal/Author Name Estimator, can help narrow down your search and find a journal that matches the scope of your research.
Submitting to a society journal like The JI or ImmunoHorizons has several advantages. The JI has a cited half-life of 15+ years, indicating that the journal publishes foundational science that advances the field of knowledge. As a society journal, it is a nonprofit operation with a legitimate peer-review model. All articles published in IH are fully open-access, making your work accessible to researchers all over the world. Publication fees directly support the mission of AAI, funding career awards, program offerings, advocacy efforts, and more.
The submission process
Once you’ve decided to submit your research to The JI or IH, your manuscript undergoes a content-neutral quality review by the appropriate Section Editor. The Section Editor determines if the submission is fundamentally publishable and weeds out any out-of-scope or very low-quality papers.
Peer review
The Section Editor then identifies potential reviewers for the submission and secures two scientists with appropriate expertise from a large database of reviewers and authors for peer review. The average peer-review period is two weeks.
The reviewers send their comments to the Section Editor, who uses them to make a recommendation to the Editor-in-Chief (EIC). Very likely, the reviewers will have decided that revisions are needed. The Section Editor must consider whether those revisions are necessary to support the conclusions of the article, whether they would be prohibitively costly, and whether they could be reasonably completed within nine months. To streamline the revision process, the EICs require Section Editors to provide authors with a prioritized list of only the most essential revisions, helping them focus on what is truly necessary rather than responding to an overly long list of reviewer requests.
The initial decision
Based on the Section Editor’s recommendation, the EIC assigns the submission to one of five possible outcomes:
- Accept
- Accept with minor revisions
- Accept with major revisions
- Reject
- Transfer to IH (if submitted to The JI)
Less than 1% of submissions to The JI are accepted without revisions. Of the rest, approximately half are accepted with revisions, and half are rejected or referred to IH. In 2025, the average time from submission to initial decision for The JI was 35 days. For IH it was 32 days.
Revision time!
If your manuscript is accepted with minor revisions, you will need to make textual changes or perhaps soften or strengthen your conclusions. Major revisions generally mean going back to the lab to develop more or better data; use a better sample size; or reanalyze the existing data. Both journals allow nine months for major revisions (with a three-month extension), but most revisions are submitted within three or four months. Resubmitted manuscripts have a 95% acceptance rate at The JI and 100% at IH.
So your article has been accepted for publication…
Once your article has been accepted, you will pay the publication fee and, if necessary, the Open Access fee. AAI members receive a significant discount on both of these fees. After acceptance, your article will typically be published into an issue in six to eight weeks. In the meantime, editorial staff will run plagiarism detection and image forensics processes to further ensure that the research is original and valid.
The article will receive promotion on social media and OUP will provide you with a shareable link. You will be able to see metrics (such as citations or Altmetrics) for your article as well.
The ImmunoHorizons path
If a manuscript submitted to The JI is based on solid research but is not within the scope of the journal, editors may recommend that the manuscript be transferred to ImmunoHorizons, the AAI open-access journal. A Section Editor may make this recommendation in initial review, or the EIC can reject from The JI but refer to IH.
If you accept this recommendation, any peer review comments will be transferred along with the manuscript. Minor changes may be made at this point as well. The EIC of IH will personally review the manuscript and make a decision within five days. Manuscripts that go through this process have a 100% acceptance rate at IH.
The benefits of a society journal
Publishing at a society journal like The JI or IH helps support AAI and the immunological community. All editorial decisions are made by practicing scientists who look for rigorous methodology and well-supported conclusions that advance the field. AAI journals have stood the test of time.
