Rejected from Astronomy & Astrophysics? The 7 Best Journals to Submit Next

Source: Clarivate JCR 2024 via AAS and arXiv astrophysics IF reporting; A&A/EDP Sciences, AAS Journals, Oxford University Press, Springer Nature, and Open Journal of Astrophysics author pages (accessed June 2026).

1. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. This is the closest broad-scope analogue to A&A and the default lateral move. It is soundness-based with a similar bar, accepts roughly half to sixty percent of papers reaching review, and puts your work in front of a fresh UK and Commonwealth referee pool that reads it without A&A's prior framing. If A&A returned you on fit or breadth rather than substance, MNRAS is where most authors go first.

2. The Astrophysical Journal. The other natural lateral target and the broad American flagship. ApJ shares A&A's soundness philosophy and similar acceptance range, so a paper A&A's referee found too narrow can land cleanly if the contribution reads as significant new research. It is the strongest choice when your audience is the mainstream astrophysics conversation rather than specifically the European community.

3. The Astronomical Journal. The AAS sibling whose editorial identity rewards exactly what A&A sometimes finds too documentary: observation, surveys, catalogs, and data products. If the real contribution of your paper is the dataset, the measurement, or the survey itself rather than a new physical interpretation, AJ frames that as a feature, not a weakness. Its quanta-based gold open access starts from roughly $1,425, so factor the charge in if you leave the no-APC Subscribe-to-Open world of A&A.

4. A&A Letters. Stay in the A&A house only if your result is genuinely urgent and broad enough to compress. A&A Letters caps the main text at about 3,000 words and runs a faster, free track, so it is not a softer A&A or a back door for a rejected full paper. Sending a full study here gets it returned for compression or redirected; a rejected article is not promoted to a Letter.

5. Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. The right home when the technique is the protagonist: a new instrument, a data-analysis method, a pipeline, or software that other astronomers will use. If A&A returned your paper because the astrophysics felt thin but the method is genuinely new, reframe the contribution and PASP becomes the natural fit.

6. Nature Astronomy. This is a reach-up, not a step-down. With an acceptance rate near eight percent it rejects most of what it sees, and editors triage on broad significance before any review. Submit here only if you have a true broad-interest discovery a non-specialist would care about, not as a way to recover from an A&A return.

7. Open Journal of Astrophysics. The fast, free, fully open route. It is a refereed arXiv overlay journal with one criterion: if the paper is suitable for the astro-ph section of arXiv, it is in scope. There is no charge for authors and no paywall for readers. It suits work where a clean, prompt, open refereed record matters more than a legacy title.

EDP Sciences does not run a one-click cascade transfer for A&A the way the large multidisciplinary portfolios do. A&A Letters is a separate submission through the same Nestor system, not an automatic soft landing for a rejected full paper, and your referee reports do not travel with you to another journal.

A handling editor may suggest a better format or a more specialist venue, but you resubmit fresh and you drive the ladder, not an algorithm. That makes the next step a decision, which is the whole point of choosing by rejection reason rather than by prestige order.

Practical ladder by rejection reason:

• Returned for breadth of interest or framing, science sound? Do not resubmit the same framing to another flagship and expect a different result. The fit problem follows the paper.

Move laterally to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society or The Astrophysical Journal, where a different editor and referee pool assess it fresh, and widen the astrophysical framing first.

• The real contribution is data, a survey, or a method? Step to the venue whose scope rewards that: The Astronomical Journal for observation and catalog work, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific for instrumentation, software, and data-analysis advances.

Reframing the abstract around the actual contribution matters more than the destination.

• Returned after referee review on error treatment or overstated significance? Fix it before resubmitting anywhere. Every soundness-based venue, MNRAS, ApJ, A&A on a second pass, raises the same point.

Carry the corrected uncertainty analysis and the toned-down claims into the next submission.

• Need speed and openness over a legacy title? The Open Journal of Astrophysics gives a refereed, free, open record fast, as long as the work is astro-ph suitable.

In our pre-submission review work with Astronomy & Astrophysics manuscripts, the returns we see most often cluster into four named patterns. In our review of these submissions, each named rejection pattern is journal-specific and testable against your own manuscript, which is what makes them worth checking before you resubmit anywhere. A&A referees routinely reject on the first of these even when the analysis is flawless.

Data or pipeline output with no astrophysical conclusion. Across our Astronomy & Astrophysics pre-submission reviews, the single most common referee trigger is a manuscript whose deliverable is a catalog, a reduction, or a simulation run rather than a result. The methods are sound and the data are real, but the paper never states what astrophysical question the new data answered, what the field now knows that it did not before.

A&A wants work that advances an astrophysical problem, so a referee returns a clean documentation paper as out of scope even when the analysis is faultless. The fix is to make the conclusion explicit in the abstract and discussion: name the result that required this dataset. This is testable: read your own abstract and ask whether the last sentence states a finding or just describes what you produced.

Error and uncertainty treatment that does not survive a referee. A second recurring pattern in the Astronomy & Astrophysics manuscripts we review is a quantitative claim whose statistical support is thin. A detection, a correlation, or a parameter constraint is reported with no error bars, no systematics budget, or a sample too small for the stated significance, and the conclusion is phrased more strongly than the numbers allow.

A&A referees treat error propagation as a first-class part of the review, so this is precisely where a borderline paper is tested. Add the uncertainty analysis, state the confidence intervals, and soften any claim the statistics do not carry. Check that every headline number in your results section shows its uncertainty in the figure or table behind it.

A narrow-subfield paper with no broader framing. We see manuscripts written entirely for a small community, technically correct, but with an introduction and discussion that never connect the result to the wider astronomy conversation. A&A is a general flagship, not a specialty venue, so a referee returns a paper that reads as a subfield note with a request to widen the framing, or rejects it as too narrow.

The fix is rarely new science; it is an introduction that states why the broader field should care and a discussion that places the result in context. Read your own introduction and ask whether a non-specialist astronomer would understand, by the end of the first page, why this matters.

Format and venue mismatch between an article and a Letter. The fourth pattern is a result whose ambition and its format do not match. A genuinely urgent, broad-interest discovery is buried in a full A&A article and loses impact, or a complete multi-section study is squeezed toward the roughly 3,000-word A&A Letters limit and gets returned for compression.

A&A Letters is a different format with a higher urgency-and-breadth bar, not a faster lane to A&A and not a destination for a rejected article. Decide honestly whether the field needs this now, compressible to a Letter, or whether it is a full study that needs room, and match the manuscript to the format before you submit.

Don't just resubmit the same file laterally. The fastest way to collect a second rejection is to send an unrevised manuscript to a journal that screens for the same thing A&A did, and some manuscripts need real work, not a faster next submission. A return for breadth or framing is a routing problem you can fix by choosing the right journal and widening the astrophysical argument.

A post-referee return for thin error treatment or a missing conclusion is a substance problem, and the same concern will reappear at any soundness-based venue. Be honest about which one you got.

Two cases call for real work before resubmitting, not a faster next submission. First, if the referee questioned your statistics, the manuscript needs the error analysis, systematics budget, or confidence intervals it was missing, and the claims toned down to match. Second, if the contribution itself was judged too narrow or under-framed, no journal change alone fixes that; the paper needs a clearer statement of why the broader field should care, or genuinely new analysis.

Appealing is rarely worth it: a scope, framing, or significance return is an editorial judgment, not a factual error, and the appeal queue is slower than a clean resubmission to a better-fit journal.