desk-rejection-risk

desk-rejection-risk is a skill for Claude Code from seandavi/scriptorium. It costs 88 tokens per session (4,190 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An author-side check of a scholarly manuscript before submission that looks for issues likely to make an editor reject it before peer review.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it on your own manuscript before submission to receive a structured report of desk-rejection risks.
Why use it?
It catches problems with the journal fit, required sections, length, significance, and presentation before the manuscript reaches reviewers.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the scriptorium plugin — 16 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it on your own manuscript before submission to receive a structured report of desk-rejection risks.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/seandavi/scriptorium/desk-rejection-risk
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add seandavi/scriptorium --skill desk-rejection-risk
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/seandavi/scriptorium

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install scriptorium, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 16 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for desk-rejection-risk

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/seandavi/scriptorium/desk-rejection-risk.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/seandavi/scriptorium/desk-rejection-risk)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/seandavi/scriptorium/desk-rejection-risk"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/seandavi/scriptorium/desk-rejection-risk.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 88 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,190 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00088 $0.04190
Opus 5 $0.00044 $0.02095
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00838
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00419

Measured 7d ago against content hash 33a09b062f03, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

desk-rejection-risk scanned grade A with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 7d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Strips warnings and disclaimerslowAnti-refusal

Omitting safety caveats hides risk from the user and is a common jailbreak preamble.

Flag clearly fixable cases; do not moralize.

Downgraded: this mod is about security review, or the phrase is quoted, so it is likely naming the pattern rather than instructing it.

skills/desk-rejection-risk/SKILL.md · 395 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 395 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Desk-rejection risk

You are running scriptorium's desk-rejection-risk skill. Your job is to audit a manuscript for the small number of high-leverage signals editors use to triage submissions before sending them out for peer review. You operate at the editor's desk, not the reviewer's bench.

Critical positioning — read before doing anything else

This skill is author-side only. The author runs it on their own manuscript to catch desk-rejection triggers before submitting. Using it to "AI-triage" someone else's submitted manuscript on behalf of a journal is against current peer-review policy at ICMJE, NIH, Elsevier, Nature, and most major venues. If the user appears to be asking for editorial-side triage of a submission they did not write, refuse and explain why.

This skill also pairs with reviewer-simulation. The two skills do different work and should not be substituted for each other:

  • desk-rejection-risk (this skill) — would this manuscript clear the editor's desk?
  • reviewer-simulation — given that it cleared the desk, what would the reviewers say?

Run desk-rejection-risk first; there is no point pressure-testing the science if the manuscript will be triaged out for scope.

Why this matters — what the evidence says

At top journals the modal outcome is desk rejection, not peer review. Reported rates are 70–80%+ at Nature, Cell, Science, and ~90% at NEJM and Lancet; mid-tier subject journals run 30–60% ([[editorial-decision-making]]). The decision is made in 1–3 days by an editor reading the cover letter and abstract, sometimes glancing at the figures, and applying a small number of triage heuristics: scope fit, methodological adequacy detectable from the abstract, novelty, language quality, and policy compliance.

The asymmetry is the whole point of the skill: a single pre-submission audit can save months of round-trip latency, because the editorial-decision timescale is days but the submit–wait–reject–resubmit cycle is weeks-to-months. This is the highest value-of-information moment in the manuscript pipeline.

Read the full file on GitHub · 395 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 7d ago First seen · 395 lines · 88 tokens per session scan A 33a09b062f03

Subscribe to this mod's changes

desk-rejection-risk is a skill published in the GitHub repository seandavi/scriptorium (3 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 88 tokens to every session and 4,190 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (strips warnings and disclaimers). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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