An academic rate limiter: IEEE TWC now caps authors at 36 new manuscripts a year

IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications has added a line to its submission policy:

An author may submit at most 36 new manuscripts to the IEEE TWC each year.

Three papers a month. To a single journal. As an upper bound.

This is an academic rate limiter — and like every rate limit, the interesting information is not the threshold but the traffic that made the threshold necessary. Nobody writes a rule against behaviour that nobody exhibits. A cap of 36 is set so high that it will never touch a researcher publishing at a normal pace; it is aimed squarely at the tail of the distribution, at the patterns that have been straining editorial capacity for years:

volume submission, where the same author appears on dozens of manuscripts a year in one venue;
salami slicing, where a single contribution is partitioned into the largest number of separately publishable units;
authorship inflation, where names accumulate on papers faster than contributions do;
quantity-driven incentives, where the metric being optimized is the count, not the content.

The policy does not solve any of these. It bounds them. That is a different and more modest thing — the editorial equivalent of adding a throttle when the queue starts dropping requests.

What I find genuinely striking is that the number had to be written down at all. Somewhere there is an editorial board that looked at its own submission logs and concluded that “36 per author per year” was a reasonable ceiling. I assume subscription tiers are next: upgrade to unlock a higher quota.

For the record, I have 36 papers left to reach my annual IEEE TWC quota.

The serious question underneath the joke is one the field has been avoiding: where exactly is the line between academic productivity and mass production — and who is supposed to draw it, if not the journals themselves?