Call for Papers (CFP): What It Is and How to Vet It

What a call for papers actually is

A call for papers (CFP) is a public invitation from a journal, conference, workshop, or edited volume asking researchers to submit work for consideration. It states the scope, required format (full paper, abstract, or poster proposal), submission deadline, and review process — details a research office should verify before treating a solicitation as legitimate.

CFPs exist for two structurally different kinds of venue, and conflating them is a common source of confusion for early-career researchers and research-office staff fielding questions:

• Journal CFPs — usually tied to a special issue or thematic collection within an ongoing journal, with a rolling or fixed submission window feeding the journal’s standard peer-review pipeline.
• Conference CFPs — tied to a specific event date and location (or virtual format), with abstract or paper submission, a program-committee review, and a presentation obligation if accepted. Many fields also route conference abstracts into a published conference proceeding.

A CFP typically specifies: the topic scope (often as a list of subtopics or tracks), submission format and length limits, the review model, key dates (submission deadline, notification date, camera-ready deadline, event or publication date), and — for conferences — registration and any article-processing or presentation fees.

Where legitimate CFPs come from

Researchers and research-support staff encounter CFPs through a handful of recurring, generally reliable channels:

• Direct from the publisher or society — a journal’s own website, a scholarly society’s mailing list or member portal, or a conference series’ official site. This is the most reliable channel because it removes any intermediary.
• Aggregator and listing sites — services such as WikiCFP and discipline-specific mailing lists (e.g. field-specific listservs, H-Net for humanities) compile CFPs across many venues. These are convenient discovery tools but are not vetting mechanisms — inclusion in an aggregator is not an endorsement of the venue’s legitimacy, since most aggregators accept submissions from organizers with little or no screening.
• The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) — for open-access journal special-issue CFPs specifically, checking whether the parent journal is DOAJ-indexed is a useful, if partial, legitimacy signal, since DOAJ inclusion requires meeting editorial and transparency criteria the journal has to actively demonstrate.
• Professional and disciplinary associations — scholarly societies (e.g. field-specific associations, ACM, IEEE, APA-style bodies) publish CFPs for their own conferences and affiliated journals, and these carry the association’s own reputational weight.
• Institutional research offices and library guides — many university libraries and research-support offices maintain curated CFP feeds or forward them selectively, which functions as an informal first filter.
• Unsolicited email — the channel with the highest concentration of both genuine invitations (a journal soliciting a known expert for a special issue) and predatory solicitation. Treat an unsolicited CFP email as a starting point for verification, never as sufficient evidence on its own.

How to evaluate whether a CFP is legitimate

A CFP is only as trustworthy as the venue behind it, and the mechanics of predatory publishing and predatory conferences (both covered in CASRAI’s guide to identifying predatory journals and publishers) apply directly to how a CFP should be read. Two checklist initiatives are widely used specifically for this purpose: Think.Check.Submit, aimed at journal and book submissions, and Think.Check.Attend, its conference-specific counterpart, both maintained by community-run initiatives that walk researchers through a structured set of legitimacy questions before they submit or register.

Verify the publisher or organizer independently

• Go to the journal’s or conference series’ own website directly — don’t just click through the CFP email or listing — and check that the CFP is actually posted there, not only distributed via email or a third-party aggregator.
• For a journal, check whether it is indexed in DOAJ (for open-access titles) or in the discipline’s standard bibliographic databases. Note that a valid ISSN is not evidence of legitimacy — predatory journals can and do hold real ISSNs.
• Check whether the publisher is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), or has adopted the joint Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing (published jointly by COPE, DOAJ, OASPA, and WAME) — membership isn’t infallible, but the absence of any of these affiliations on an otherwise-unknown venue is a reason to look closer.
• For a conference, confirm the event has a genuine track record: past editions with an archived program, a named venue and dates that check out independently, and an organizing committee whose members are identifiable, real researchers in the stated field — not names that don’t return any independent search results.

Read the scope and editorial board critically

• Predatory CFPs frequently use scope language broad enough to accept almost anything, because the business model depends on volume of paid submissions rather than fit. A CFP that spans multiple, only loosely related disciplines in one call is a warning sign.
• Check that named editors or program-committee members are real, contactable, and have actually agreed to serve — researchers whose names are used on editorial boards without their knowledge is a documented predatory-publishing tactic.

Scrutinize the timeline and review process

• A review-and-acceptance turnaround of days (sometimes literally 24-48 hours) for a full paper is not compatible with genuine peer review and is one of the more reliable predatory signals, for both journal special issues and conferences.
• Legitimate CFPs specify a review model consistent with the venue’s normal practice — if a journal that otherwise runs double-anonymized peer review claims a special issue will skip review entirely, that’s inconsistent with its own standards.

Check the fee structure and how it’s disclosed

• Article processing charges (APCs) or conference registration fees are not themselves a red flag — most open-access journals and most conferences charge them, and DOAJ-indexed journals are required to disclose APC amounts clearly. The problem is an undisclosed fee that only appears after acceptance, or a fee structure where “presenting” costs substantially more than simply attending with no clear justification.
• Compare the fee against known, comparable venues in the field — a figure far outside the normal range for the discipline warrants a second look.

Watch the language of the solicitation itself

• Excessive flattery (“Distinguished Professor,” addressed to a junior researcher who has never been contacted by this venue before), generic greetings that don’t use the recipient’s actual name or field, and urgency pressure (“submit within 48 hours to secure your slot”) are common in predatory outreach.
• Overuse of “international,” “global,” or “world-renowned” in the CFP itself, without independently verifiable evidence of an actual international program or readership, is a soft signal worth weighing alongside the harder checks above.

A practical verification sequence

1. Locate the CFP on the organizer’s own official website, independent of the email or listing that surfaced it.
2. Check the venue’s indexing/membership status (DOAJ for OA journals, COPE/OASPA affiliation, discipline-standard databases) and, for conferences, the track record of prior editions.
3. Identify at least one named editor or committee member and confirm, via an independent search, that they are a real researcher associated with the field and, ideally, that they’ve publicly discussed involvement with this specific venue.
4. Confirm the stated review timeline is realistic for the claimed review model.
5. Confirm all fees are disclosed up front, in writing, on the official site — not revealed only after submission or acceptance.
6. Cross-check against your institution’s library guide or research office, many of which maintain their own predatory-venue watchlists or can advise directly.

Frequently asked questions

What’s the difference between a call for papers and a call for abstracts?

A call for abstracts typically asks for a shorter summary of proposed work as a first-stage submission — common for conferences, where accepted abstracts are later expanded into a full paper, poster, or presentation. A call for papers can refer to the same two-stage process or, especially for journals, to a request for complete manuscripts. The terms are used inconsistently across fields, so always check the CFP’s own stated format requirements rather than assuming from the label alone.

Is a CFP that arrives by unsolicited email automatically predatory?

No. Journals and conference organizers legitimately email researchers whose prior work fits a special issue or session topic, particularly to invite submissions from authors they’ve identified through citation searches. The email itself isn’t the signal — how it reads (flattery, urgency, vague scope) and whether the venue verifies independently are what determine legitimacy.

Does appearing on a CFP aggregator site mean a venue has been vetted?

No. Most CFP aggregators, including the widely used general-purpose ones, accept listings from organizers with little to no independent screening. Treat an aggregator listing as a discovery tool, not a legitimacy check.

Where can a research office get help evaluating a specific CFP?

Most university libraries maintain a predatory-publishing guide with a contact librarian, and many research offices provide the same service directly — both are usually faster and more field-specific than a generic online checklist for a borderline case.