The biggest LIE academic publishers have sold you is that submitting to multiple journals at once is “UNETHICAL.” It’s not. The real reason the single-submission rule exists is to enforce a publishing CARTEL. By forcing authors to submit to a single journal at a time, publishers ensure they never have to compete with each other. No competition on speed. No competition on service. No competition on how they treat authors or reviewers. And that saves them a lot of MONEY. If you think this sounds extreme, there is a major antitrust class-action lawsuit happening right now: Uddin v. Elsevier et al., trying to take down this publishing cartel. The single-submission rule creates DELAY by design. Journals have zero incentive to be fast, responsive, or efficient—because once you submit, you’re trapped. That’s why submission systems typically suck. Then they tell you the rule is “necessary” because multiple submissions would overwhelm peer reviewers. That’s nonsense. Reviewers could submit the same report to multiple competing journals, even simultaneously. Editorial coordination is a logistical problem, not an ethical one. They also claim the rule prevents duplicate publication. That’s ridiculous. Duplication is trivially preventable with a basic journal-to-journal communication system. Law journals already do this. And in fiction and poetry, multiple submission is the norm. You just notify other outlets when one accepts the piece. If you don’t, you hurt your reputation in the community. But the academic publishing cartel pretends they can't change, that the system works, but it works only for them. The single-submission rule is not ethical. It’s not necessary. It’s a cartel rule that needs to be broken.