Saving the slush pile: The importance of unsolicited manuscript submission policies for the continued strength of the Canadian publishing industry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Harbour Publishing and Douglas & McIntyre are two Canadian independent publishers that accept unsolicited submissions, which means that anyone, anywhere, can submit a manuscript for their publishing consideration without going through a literary agent or internal referral. On the surface, independent publishing house policies that allow unsolicited submissions may appear to be an inefficient and time-consuming practice; however, this report will analyze such policies and argue that their benefits outweigh the drawbacks. Unsolicited manuscript policies protect authors and provide them with increased agency, benefit publishing houses by introducing a greater depth and variety of manuscripts, and strengthen the entire Canadian publishing industry with increased mobility and creating more space for books written by and for Canadians.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.093 | 0.336 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.044 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.022 | 0.012 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".