Simultaneous Submission Bans as Peer-Review Congestion Control: Why ‘Ethics’ Language Governs a Capacity-Constrained Review System

Simultaneous submission bans are often justified in ethical terms, yet they also function as congestion control in a capacity-constrained peer-review system. When the same manuscript is reviewed in parallel, duplicated editorial triage and (if external review begins in multiple venues) duplicated reviewer labour generate negative externalities that inflate queues and can degrade timeliness, review quality, and distributive fairness. This article reframes the ban as a governance response to scarce processing capacity and proposes that ethics language can operate as a low-cost enforcement technology when monitoring is difficult. Within this frame, desk rejection is interpreted as a low-cost throttling mechanism that protects downstream review capacity while raising risks of opacity, misclassification, and novelty suppression. The article concludes with testable propositions and a research agenda for evaluating these claims across fields and policy regimes; it does not endorse rule-breaking and assumes standard disclosure and withdrawal procedures.