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I submitted a paper to a journal. They finally accepted it and asked me to pay a fee. However, due to my economic condition, I was not able to pay the fee.

After 2 years, I finally payed the fee, but now they say the paper is two years old and they cannot publish it. Can they reject my paper after accepting it due to late fees?

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  • To the OP, please do not use all capital letters. It's considered shouting and rude on Internet.
    – Nobody
    Jul 3, 2017 at 4:54
  • I don't think this question deserves (so many) downvotes.
    – gerrit
    Jul 3, 2017 at 10:16
  • At least you need to investigate the new researches that have been done in this two years and check if your research goal has not been addressed in this mean time by others. Two years is a lot of time in academia. So a resubmit is not so illogical in my mind.
    – user35129
    Jul 3, 2017 at 20:53

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It depends on what the terms and conditions are. If the terms specify that you need to pay the fee within a certain period of time, then they can. If the terms don't specify this but give the editor some discretion on certain issues, the they might also do this.

The question that you should ask yourself however is whether it matters whether they are allowed to do this. You might be in the right, but would you really be willing to go to court over this?

What you need to do is to convince them that they should publish your article. One way to do this is to apologize to the editor for not paying the fee sooner, and ask them whether it is possible to re-submit to this journal. Your personal circumstances are neither here nor there. You can at most mention that due to personal circumstances you did not pay the fee at the time and leave it at that. And if it is not possible, then submit the paper to another journal. What happened in the past is now in the past and is irrelevant for all practical purposes. You might have an in with this journal, but if not, then you're probably better off accepting it and moving on to a different journal.

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    If in the research field timeliness is important, I would argue that publishing an article that is more that 2 years old might not do much good to the journal and strongly consider not publishing it. After all, when you submit your article you should be fully aware of expectations in terms of payment of publication fees.
    – o4tlulz
    Jul 4, 2017 at 4:30

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