Emerald Publishing is the leading independent specialist publisher for business, management, and the applied social sciences. Its portfolio of 300+ peer-reviewed journals includes long-established field flagships such as the European Journal of Marketing, the International Journal of Operations & Production Management, and the Journal of Knowledge Management, alongside strong lists in library and information science, education, hospitality and tourism, accounting, and public policy.

The company has an unusual origin story: it was founded in 1967 by management academics at the University of Bradford (as MCB, later MCB University Press) who were dissatisfied with the publishing outlets of the day - their first journal, Management Decision, was bought for £1. Renamed Emerald in 2002 after its Emerald Fulltext database, the publisher remains independently owned and headquartered in Bingley, West Yorkshire, with all content hosted on the Emerald Insight platform. This guide covers how to pick the right Emerald journal, what open access costs, how peer review works, and how to submit.

Emerald's journals are concentrated in management and the social sciences, so the choice is usually about subfield, method, and open-access needs rather than imprint. Use the routes below as a starting point.

• 300+ peer-reviewed journals across business, management, economics, accounting and finance, marketing, operations and logistics, HR and organisational behaviour, tourism and hospitality, education, library and information science, health and social care, and engineering management.
• 2,500+ books and book series, including the Advances series and research monographs, hosted alongside journals on Emerald Insight.
• Case studies via Emerald Emerging Markets Case Studies and partner collections, widely used in management teaching.
• Fully open access and diamond journals - a smaller but growing group (~11 fully-OA titles plus no-fee diamond journals run with university and association partners), many aligned to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Emerald closed its Emerald Open Research platform and folded that effort into this gold OA journal programme.

Emerald offers three OA routes:

• Gold OA (hybrid and fully-OA) - every one of the 300+ journals offers a gold OA option. Emerald uses a single flat-rate APC rather than per-journal pricing: currently about £3,222 / $4,351 / €3,710 plus tax (2026 list; always check the live price page before submitting). Articles are published under CC BY or CC BY-NC. APCs are typically waived in a new fully-OA journal's first year.
• Diamond OA - a set of sponsored journals with no author fee, funded by partner universities and associations.
• Green OA (self-archiving) - Emerald was one of the first publishers to adopt a zero-embargo green policy (since 2014): you may share your author accepted manuscript (AAM) in a repository under CC BY-NC as soon as the article is published on Emerald Insight, at no cost. This satisfies most funder mandates without an APC.

Authors in World Bank low- and lower-middle-income countries are eligible for APC waivers or reductions, and Emerald has Read & Publish (transformative) agreements with library consortia in the UK (Jisc), continental Europe, North America (e.g. SCELC), and Asia-Pacific - check the ESAC registry or ask your library whether your institution's deal covers the fee.

• Default model: double-anonymized peer review - author and reviewer identities are concealed - which remains the norm across the management and social-science portfolio.
• Reviewers: typically two or more independent reviewers per paper, managed by the journal's editor via ScholarOne.
• Turnaround: varies by title; first decisions commonly take 2-4 months in the field flagships. Check the journal's homepage for its published average.

1. Pick the journal. Use Emerald's journal finder or browse the subject lists on emerald.com to shortlist titles matching your topic and method.
2. Read the author guidelines. Every Emerald journal has title-specific guidelines; Emerald journals use Harvard (author-date) style references.
3. Prepare your manuscript. Follow the structured-abstract requirement (purpose, design/methodology, findings, originality) that most Emerald titles use; SciSpace templates for Emerald journals handle formatting.
4. Submit via ScholarOne Manuscripts. Each journal has its own ScholarOne site, linked from the journal homepage; you register per journal.
5. Track and revise. ScholarOne handles status tracking, reviewer reports, and revision rounds through to acceptance.

Emerald is a member of COPE, OASPA, and STM, and follows COPE guidelines on authorship disputes, plagiarism, and retractions. Its publication-ethics pages set out policies on AI-assisted writing disclosure, data sharing, and conflicts of interest. As an established, indexed specialist publisher, Emerald carries no predatory-publishing concerns; criticism, where it appears, focuses on subscription and APC pricing rather than editorial standards.