It Pays to Publish, but Don't Pay to Publish

This just over the transom:

Dear Colleague,

British Journal of Education, Society & Behavioural Science (ISSN: 2278-0998) is an OPEN peer-reviewed INTERNATIONAL journal. We offer both Online publication as well as Hard copy options. Article Processing Charge is only 100 USD as per present offer. This journal is now publishing Volume 10.

Only 100 semolians?  Get out of here, and take your crappy journal with you.

If you need to pay to publish, then you shouldn't be publishing.   It is not that difficult to publish for free in good outlets.  If I can do it, so can you.  Here is my PhilPapers page which lists some of my publications.  My passion for philosophy far outstrips my ability at it, but if you have a modicum of ability you can publish in decent places.  When I quit my tenured post and went maverick, I feared that no one would touch my work.  But I found that lack of an institutional affiliation did not bar me from very good journals such as Nous and Analysis.

Here are a few suggestions off the top of my head. 

1. Don't submit anything that you haven't made as good as you can make it.  Don't imagine that editors and referees will sense the great merit and surpassing brilliance of your inchoate ideas and help you refine them. That is not their job. Their job is to find a justification to dump your paper among the 70-90 % that get rejected.

2. Demonstrate that you are cognizant of the extant literature on your topic. 

3. Write concisely and precisely about a well-defined issue.

4. Advance a well-defined thesis.

5. Don't rant or polemicize. That's what your blog is for.  Referring to Brian Leiter as a corpulent apparatchik of political correctness and proprietor of a popular philosophy gossip site won't endear you to his sycophants one or two of whom you may be unfortunate enough to have as referees.

6.  Know your audience and submit the right piece to the right journal.  Don't send a lengthy essay on Simone Weil to Analysis.

7. When the paper you slaved over is rejected, take it like a man or the female equivalent thereof.  Never protest editorial decisions.  You probably wrote something substandard, something that, ten years from now, you will be glad was not embalmed in printer's ink.  You have no right to have your paper accepted.  You may think it's all a rigged wheel and a good old boys' network.  In my experience it is not. Most of those who complain are just not very good at what they do.

Sorry if the above is a tad obvious.