Paper Withdrawal before Publication - Can I send the paper elsewhere

Question

I submitted a paper for publication in a journal indexed by Scopus. Before acceptance, I sent an e-mail requesting withdrawal of the paper because the review process took longer than expected. I did not receive any reply. Later, I received an acceptance notice with two major problems.

1. They requested publication fees much higher than the advertised one.
2. They did not provide any reviewer comments.

For those reasons, I insisted on withdrawing the paper. I neither paid any fees nor signed the copyright transfer form. I sent a second e-mail stating that I would like to withdraw the paper because of those reasons, but again received no reply. Finally, I sent an e-mail with a notice that I assume the paper is withdrawn.

Can I go ahead and send the paper somewhere else?

Answer 1

As long as you can prove that you withdrew your paper, you can submit to another journal. The possibly delicate point is with the proof.

I would think that in case the first submission comes up, any sensible editor would take a copy (with all headings) of the emails you sent to withdraw as a decent enough proof. Moreover, what you describe points to the first journal being predatory, which might be easy to decide for the second journal editor depending on how obviously predatory it looks. Then the first journal would not have much credit, even if they would go as far as forge emails.

If you want to be completely safe, you can mention in the cover letter that you submitted your paper to another journal quite some time ago, and then decided to withdraw it (precise that you mentions this because the first journal never answered you emails). It would make your case bullet-proof in case the first submission ever comes out. This might not reflect too well on your submission however (it might prompt the reason why you withdrew, or it might make the editor fear you could withdraw again while he or she bothered to get a report), but I would not think it would have a significant impact.

Last, it seems you might have submitted to a predatory journal, and that would mean you should have been more cautious. If you don't know a journal, don't publish there without getting an opinion by someone well established knowing the journal.

Answer 2

You just need to communicate this matter with the editor before publishing. The editor has confirmed withdrawing your manuscript. You can submit it to other journals.