About the Journal

About the journal

Journal of Sidequests publishes careful investigations into questions researchers pursued beyond their everyday work. Think science-fair curiosity with the methods, uncertainty estimates, and documentation you wish every science fair required.

A question that starts as a joke can lead to research worth publishing, provided the work stands up to scrutiny.

What belongs here

Experiments, simulations, measurements, and engineering investigations driven by a question someone could not leave alone. We welcome small studies, useful failures, replications, and negative results. A project does not need a large grant, fashionable topic, or career-changing conclusion.

It does need a clear question, methods someone else can follow, an honest account of the limitations, and conclusions supported by the evidence. Authors do not need a PhD or institutional affiliation. We assess submissions on the quality of the work.

Peer review

Each research submission receives editorial screening and review by one independent external reviewer with relevant expertise. The editor makes the acceptance decision. A second opinion may be requested when a specific technical question or conflict requires it.

Reviewers assess the methods, analysis, reporting, and support for the conclusions. We do not require dramatic results or predictions about future citation counts. Reviewers know the authors’ identities; reviewer identities are kept confidential unless disclosure is agreed. Editors and reviewers must disclose conflicts of interest.

Publication fee

Payment requests are paused while payment processing is being activated. The $50 USD publication fee still applies, and accepted authors will be contacted about payment before publication unless the editor grants a fee waiver.

The publication fee is $50 USD per accepted article, requested only after peer review and an editorial acceptance decision. There is no submission fee. Payment does not influence acceptance. Published research is free to read.

The fee helps cover website hosting, manuscript and article storage, backups, email, payment processing, and ongoing maintenance of the publishing system. These costs continue after an article is published, and the fee helps keep the journal running while leaving articles free to read.

Editors may waive the publication fee for individual articles. Authors can request a waiver from the editorial office; the same review and acceptance standards apply.

Research you can inspect

Submissions must include a data availability statement. Share the data, code, protocols, and design files needed to evaluate the findings wherever possible. If privacy, consent, or another restriction prevents sharing, explain what is unavailable and why.

The scholarly record

Authors retain copyright to their work. Published articles are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0), which allows reuse, including commercial reuse, with attribution.

We plan to apply for an ISSN through the U.S. ISSN Center after publishing our first issue with at least five articles. The journal has not yet been assigned an ISSN.

We are working toward providing digital object identifiers (DOIs) for published articles. DOI registration is not yet available, and we will update this policy when it is in place. In the meantime, articles can be cited using their authors, title, publication details, and journal webpage.

Errors should be corrected openly. Substantial corrections, expressions of concern, and retractions will remain linked to the affected article. We ask authors to retain their underlying research records and respond to reasonable questions about their work.