Education Technology Quarterly editorial activity report (2025)

This report provides a detailed analysis of the editorial workflow, processing efficiency, and selection trends for Education Technology Quarterly during the 2025 calendar year (January 1, 2025 – December 31, 2025), and contrasts them with cumulative historical benchmarks.

The year 2025 was a definitive milestone for the journal, characterised by an unprecedented surge in submission volume, a highly demanding screening process, and a massive acceleration in decision-making speed.

The journal experienced an extraordinary surge in submissions in 2025, receiving 87 new submissions. To put this in perspective, this single-year influx represents more than a third of the journal's entire lifetime submission history (256 papers) and completely eclipses the historical baseline average of 46 submissions per year.

This dramatic increase in popularity prompted the editorial board to apply a much more stringent quality filter, leading to a marked shift in acceptance dynamics:

1. The annual acceptance rate tightened to 19% for the year, representing a substantial shift from the cumulative historical acceptance rate of 40%.
2. Correspondingly, the overall rejection rate reached 81% (45 total declined submissions). This was heavily driven by proactive editorial screening, resulting in a 55% desk reject rate (29 submissions). An additional 16 submissions (accounting for a 26% after-review reject rate) were declined following complete peer review.
3. Balancing this rigorous intake, the journal finalised and published 24 papers during 2025, perfectly matching our stable historical output baseline of 24 papers per year and ensuring a high-calibre selection for our readership.

While handling a record-breaking volume of manuscripts, the editorial team achieved some of the fastest turnaround times in the journal's history, fundamentally reshaping the author experience.

1. The most remarkable achievement of 2025 was the drop in the average days to first editorial decision to just 9 days. This is a monumental leap in efficiency compared to the historical cumulative average of 87 days, ensuring that authors receive an initial bottleneck-free verdict almost immediately.
2. For papers that did not align with the journal's standards or scope, the timeline to issue a rejection was reduced to 53 days, a noticeable improvement over the historical average of 71 days.
3. The journey from submission to formal acceptance averaged 173 days (roughly 5.6 months). This outpaces the historical baseline of 183 days, demonstrating that the editorial board accelerated the early phases of the workflow without compromising the integrity or thoroughness of the full peer-review process.