A Pause with a Cause: Reopening Submissions in 2026

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished. —Laozi

In 2025, punctum is suspending its annual open submission season (May to July). During this time, we will not be reviewing new manuscripts. Instead, we will direct our energy toward honoring the commitments we have already made — to our current authors and editors, their book projects, and the communities that are central to our work. Our next submission season will open on May 1, 2026. Since our founding in 2011, we have never paused submissions, so we want to share the reasons why we are doing so this year.

One of the things that makes punctum distinctive as a scholarly publisher is that we provide a level of care in the acquisitions, editorial, and design processes that is uncommon in academic publishing and which is part of our mission as a scholar-led press — to provide authors with a peer-to-peer bespoke experience in all aspects of publishing their work. As such, we do everything in close collaboration with our authors and editors and no aspect of our work is ever outsourced (as is the case with many other publishers). And because we curate work that is experimental and often unclassifiable according to disciplinary and genre norms, there is no one template for any book we produce, which further complicates the production process. Moreover, we value slow, careful, and deliberative modes of work over racing on hamster wheels, and this ethic of care extends to ourselves as well as to our authors.

Over the past several years, we have experienced a steady rise in manuscript submissions, at a rate that surpasses what we can sustain, especially if we want to maintain the editorial care that our authors and readers have come to expect. Compounding this problem is the fact that we have a very difficult time saying “no” to projects that interest and excite us. As a result, we have taken on too many manuscripts, too fast, bringing us to a production backlog that is overwhelming our capacities. In order to protect the well-being of our staff, while also ensuring that the many books already under our wing receive the loving attention they deserve and are published within a reasonable amount of time, we need to pause taking on any new book projects at this time. 

This one-year pause in submissions does not mean we are pausing production — far from it. Over the next year, we will be publishing titles at the usual pace (2–3 titles published per month, for a total of 30–35 books per year), and we will also continue our usual work on helping to develop more durable infrastructures for open-access books (such as with Thoth Open Metadata and the Open Book Collective), collaborating with librarians and other publishers around the world to support and advance open-access book publishing (such as with Open Book Futures), working on a much-needed website redesign, and promoting our authors’ work at conferences, book fairs, and online.

The coming years are going to bring increasing challenges for open-access scholarly publishing and for academic research more broadly, especially under a neofascist government in the United States intent on censorship and retaliatory politics hostile to both scholarly knowledge and initiatives built on social justice. Yet our intention remains firm: We believe in a future where scholarly publishing is built on care, reciprocity, and openness, not on toxic and unsustainable market logics. And we believe in bibliodiversity. For this to be realizable, we must take a pause. We must take care.