Rejected from IEEE Access? The 6 Best Journals to Submit Next

Source: journal author guidelines and APC pages (IEEE, Springer Nature, PLOS, Cell Press, MDPI), SciRev community reports, and JCR 2024, accessed June 2026.

A quick read on each option, because the table flattens real differences.

Scientific Reports is the closest like-for-like swap. It is a Springer Nature megajournal that, like IEEE Access, publishes any technically sound paper regardless of perceived impact. If IEEE Access rejected you for scope (your work was at the edge of IEEE's fields of interest), Scientific Reports' "all of natural science" scope removes that constraint. The tradeoff is a slower process and a higher APC at $2,850.

PLOS ONE reviews for scientific soundness only and has a strong reproducibility and data-availability culture. If your IEEE Access reviewers complained about validation rigor or open data, PLOS ONE's editors care about exactly those things and will give you a fairer hearing than a novelty-gated venue would.

Heliyon (Cell Press) runs a dedicated Computer Science section covering machine learning, IoT, NLP, cybersecurity, and image analysis, plus engineering sections. It is a sensible home for an applied-CS paper that fell outside IEEE's electrical-engineering center of gravity.

MDPI Sensors, Electronics, and Applied Sciences are the speed play. If IEEE Access' "rapid" positioning was the reason you submitted there in the first place, these MDPI venues return first decisions in roughly two to four weeks and are explicitly soundness-and-reproducibility oriented. Sensors fits IoT, wearables, and signal-processing work; Electronics and Applied Sciences fit applied systems and engineering broadly.

A field-specific IEEE Transactions or IEEE open-access journal is the move when a reviewer wrote some version of "this is a real contribution to subfield X but does not belong in a broad multidisciplinary venue." That is a routing hint, not an insult. The specialist editors who own that subfield may value the work that a generalist IEEE Access pool could not place.

IEEE has no automatic transfer program, so the cascade here is something you drive manually. Think in tiers, and let the rejection reason pick the tier.

Tier 1: lateral move to a comparable sound-science venue. If IEEE Access rejected for scope or for "not enough fit," the contribution is fine; it just needs a journal whose scope contains it. Scientific Reports, PLOS ONE, and Heliyon are the first-choice lateral targets. You are not stepping down in rigor, just into a wider scope statement.

Tier 2: fast field-specific OA. If speed matters and the work is applied engineering, the MDPI venues (Sensors, Electronics, Applied Sciences) are the next tier. They are not a step down from IEEE Access in selectivity; they are a sideways move with a faster clock.

Tier 3: step up to a specialist Transactions. This is counterintuitive, but a paper rejected from a broad venue for being "too narrow" can land at the right specialist journal. If that is what your reviewers said, a field-specific IEEE Transactions or a society open-access journal (for example, IEEE Open Journal series in your field) is the next target, with the understanding that review will be slower and more selective.

The anti-tier: do not just blast it down a list. The cascade is not "submit to the next journal that will take it." Each venue still runs peer review. A soundness problem that IEEE Access caught will be caught again at Scientific Reports, PLOS ONE, and every MDPI venue, because they all use the same soundness bar. Fix the named problem before you descend a single rung.

In our pre-submission review work with IEEE Access submissions, the manuscripts that come back rejected cluster into four patterns that you can check your own paper against before you resubmit anywhere. None of them is "insufficient novelty," because IEEE Access does not gate on novelty; the failures are about fit, validation, and how the paper reads.

Scope-statement misfit that the cover letter never resolves. This is the single most common IEEE Access desk rejection we see. The paper is technically fine, but the abstract and cover letter never state which of IEEE's fields of interest the work sits in, so the editor cannot route it to a reviewer pool that can judge it.

We repeatedly flag abstracts that lead with the application domain (agriculture, finance, medicine) instead of the IEEE-relevant method (the signal-processing pipeline, the network protocol, the learning architecture). At IEEE Access, the first sentence of the abstract and the first paragraph of the cover letter have to name the engineering contribution, or the paper reads as off-scope before review even starts. Check yours: can a non-specialist editor name your IEEE subfield after reading only the abstract?

Comparison baselines that are stale or self-referential. IEEE Access reviewers consistently reject papers whose experimental section compares the proposed method only against the authors' own prior work, or only against baselines that are five or more years old, without justifying why newer methods were excluded. In our reviews of IEEE Access submissions, this shows up as a results table with two rows: "our 2022 method" and "our new method."

That is not a comparison an engineering reviewer will accept. Before resubmitting, your methods and results sections need at least one current, independent baseline, and a sentence explaining the choice of baselines.

Validation asserted but not shown in the figures or tables. Because IEEE Access screens for technical soundness, the figures and statistical analysis carry the verdict. We frequently see manuscripts that claim a performance improvement in the text while the figures show overlapping error bars, no ablation, or no measure of variance across runs.

A claim like "our approach outperforms the baseline" with a single-run bar chart and no confidence interval is the kind of thing that survives a generalist editor's desk but fails at peer review. Read your own figures as a hostile reviewer would: does each headline claim have a figure or table, with variance shown, that actually supports it?

A core contribution buried under presentation and language issues. IEEE Access lists serious formatting and language problems as a desk-rejection trigger, and we see sound work sink because the contribution is not legible. The pattern: a strong method described in dense, unedited prose, with the key result appearing on page nine, after the reader has already given up.

The abstract, the introduction's final paragraph, and the first results figure should each let a reviewer state your contribution in one sentence. If they cannot, the soundness of the work never gets evaluated, because the reviewer stops first.

Want a manuscript-level read before you resubmit? Run an IEEE Access manuscript fit check to surface scope, baseline, and validation gaps the way a reviewer would.

Do not just resubmit. The biggest mistake after an IEEE Access rejection is treating it as a formatting problem and firing the same PDF at the next journal. Because every sound-science venue on this list uses the same soundness bar, a real methodological gap will follow you down the cascade.

Separate the two cases honestly:

The paper needs real work if the rejection named missing validation, weak baselines, or unsupported claims. That is not a venue problem; new experiments or a reanalysis come first. Moving journals without fixing it just buys you a second rejection.

The paper needs a different venue if the rejection named scope, fit, or "not appropriate for this journal," while praising the technical execution. That is a routing problem, and the lateral move (Tier 1 above) is the right answer.

Appeal only when you can point to a factual error in the review, not when you simply disagree with the reviewers' judgment. A reviewer who evaluated you against the wrong baseline, or who missed a control you clearly reported, is a defensible appeal. "The reviewers underrated the contribution" is not, and the same reviewers will likely see the resubmission. When in doubt, the better-fit journal is faster than the appeal.