Where a secondary school student can publish research

A finished paper deserves a reader. For a secondary school student, there are more places to find one than most people realize, and they differ a great deal in what they expect, what they cost and how long they take. This guide lists the ones we have checked against the publishers' own pages, in October 2026. Fees and rules change, so treat every line as a starting point and confirm on the journal's site before submitting.

First, what kind of venue is this?

There are three tiers, and the honest move is to match the paper to the tier.

Student research journals exist to publish work by secondary students. Review is real but the bar is calibrated to a first project. Several charge a fee, usually after acceptance. For a Standard-track paper, these are the right target.

General academic journals publish research by anyone, reviewed by specialists in the field. Open-access publishers such as MDPI charge an article processing charge (APC) on acceptance. A student paper can be accepted here if it makes a genuine contribution; it will not be accepted because the author is young.

Conferences and workshops are where machine learning research is mostly published. A workshop at a major conference such as NeurIPS runs its own call for papers and reviews independently; a workshop paper is a real publication but not the same as a main-conference acceptance. Formal conferences such as IEEE ICMLA review to a professional standard.

Student research journals we have verified

1. 01

   International Journal of High School Research (IJHSR)

   Three journals (natural and physical sciences; engineering and computer science; business and social sciences) for original research by secondary students anywhere in the world. No fee to submit; a publication fee of US$350 after acceptance, with scholarships for eligible US students. Papers go through an editorial check for format, plagiarism and AI use, then two or more outside reviewers. Decisions typically take one to three months, and publication a further two to three. Review articles are accepted but only two or three per issue.
2. 02

   Journal of Emerging Investigators (JEI)

   A non-profit, peer-reviewed journal for original research by middle and high school students, strongest in the biological, physical and social sciences. Editors and reviewers give feedback and guide manuscripts through to publication. The journal's site points to a pay-and-submit step; check the guidelines page for the current fee and review time, which third-party guides describe as modest, with waivers, and slow.
3. 03

   National High School Journal of Science (NHSJS)

   A peer-reviewed journal for original research by high school students across the sciences, with explicit sections for computing, data and AI, health sciences, and social sciences and policy. Reviewers provide feedback and mentorship. Fees and timing are on the submission guidelines page.
4. 04

   Curieux Academic Journal

   A youth-led non-profit founded in 2017 that publishes work by high school and middle school students in any subject, sciences and humanities alike. The submissions page has the current process and any fee.
5. 05

   Journal of Research High School (JRHS)

   An open-access journal exclusively for high school researchers, publishing since 2019 with anonymous review. Scope, fees and timing are on its author pages.
6. 06

   Journal of Student Research (JSR)

   A multidisciplinary, faculty-reviewed journal that publishes high school, undergraduate and graduate work. Its site was unreachable when we checked; confirm fees and windows directly.
7. 07

   The Concord Review

   Not a science journal but the most established venue for secondary students in one field: it has published history essays by high school students, quarterly, since 1987, and is highly selective. Essays are long, typically several thousand words.

Other names appear in guides to student publishing, among them the Young Scientist Journal (Vanderbilt), the STEM Fellowship Journal, the Journal of High School Science and The Schola. We have not verified their current terms and have left them off the list above.

When to aim higher

A paper is ready for a general journal or a workshop when it does something a specialist would recognize as new, however small: rigorous new evidence on a public dataset, a reproduction that reveals a limit, a careful study of fairness, missing data, generalization or compute cost. In our Advanced track that judgement is made after the literature and experiment review, never before.

For work in machine learning and its applications, the candidates we discuss with students include open-access MDPI journals whose scope fits the project, such as Clocks & Sleep for sleep research, AI and Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction for methods and applications, and J for interdisciplinary work; IEEE ICMLA as a formal conference; and the workshops attached to NeurIPS and ICML. Each has its own scope, format and cost, and acceptance is decided by its reviewers.

Three cautions

• Fees are not quality. Some student journals charge; some do not. A fee tells you about the journal's business model, not about its review. What matters is whether the review is real and whether the journal is honest about it.
• Avoid venues that accept everything. If a journal promises publication, it is not peer review. A publication nobody respects is worth less than a strong paper on a school website.
• One paper, one venue. Submitting the same manuscript to two journals at once is a breach of academic ethics almost everywhere.