Q: Does an immediate status change from submission to 'Evaluating Recommendation' mean rejection?

Your thoughts and considerations presently are quite valid. Your intention to immediately submit to another journal in case of a rejection here shows that you are thinking of this quite smartly. It also shows that you are willing to quickly overcome a potential rejection. All great signs there!

However, a week since the status change and two weeks since submission isn’t a long time. The Editor-in-Chief (EiC), who needs to make the final decision based on the initial decision by the associate editor (AE), might also be busy with other journal responsibilities.

Note also that the EiC’s decision may not always be in line with the AE’s decision. The EiC may see merit in the manuscript and decide to send it for peer review or they may think it fits better with some other journal from the same publisher and ask you to submit there.

So, you could wait for a week or so, and in case you still haven’t heard from them, you could drop them a mail. In the mail, you could share your understanding that the manuscript could be rejected, in which case, you would rather get to know of the decision sooner so as to take your next steps. (You needn’t mention that you would then submit to another journal.)

What you could do until the next status change or until next writing to them is to write to other journals instead. You could send them a presubmission inquiry giving the details of your manuscript. That way, by the time the decision from this journal is communicated and in case it’s a rejection, some other journal may have got back to you with a mail to submit to them.

Along the same lines, and if your manuscript is in English rather than Japanese, you may also consider submitting it into our new AI-powered platform, R Pubsure, which has been designed to help authors minimize the chances of a desk rejection. It does this in two ways. Firstly, through its machine checks, it allows you to keep improving your manuscript until it’s submission-ready. Once your paper is thus ready, R Pubsure allows you to showcase the improved manuscript to several editors on the platform, one of whom may consider it for publishing with their journal. You may learn more about the platform here: R Pubsure

So, there are quite a few options for your ahead. All the best for however you proceed!

For more insights into the Evaluating Recommendation status, you may refer to these queries by other researchers:

• What does the status "Evaluation recommendation" mean?
• What is the meaning of the status 'pending recommendation'?