About Future Business Journal

Future Business Journal

Future Business Journal (often shortened to FBUJ) is an open access, peer-reviewed business journal published through Springer Nature's SpringerOpen programme in association with Future University in Egypt, which describes it as its official journal. It publishes theoretical and empirical research across management, accounting, economics, management information systems and finance, with an explicit aim of improving communication between academic researchers, policy makers and operational decision makers. Springer also notes a particular welcome for work by business researchers worldwide with an emphasis on Arab countries, which gives the journal a distinctive regional centre of gravity inside a genuinely international author and reader base. This profile is based on the journal's Springer Nature pages, its Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listing and the bibliographic record held on this site, and it separates verified facts about the journal from general guidance for authors considering it.

Quick facts

Two labelling points deserve care. First, some secondary sites swap the print and electronic ISSN labels for this journal. Springer's own journal information is unambiguous: 2314-7202 is the print ISSN and 2314-7210 is the electronic ISSN, and the pair of numbers in this site's record is the same pair. Second, the print version is not sold by Springer Nature, so readers should treat the electronic edition as the edition of record and cite the DOI of an article rather than a print page range when the two differ.

What the journal is for

Springer presents the journal as a platform for original research in varied business fields, and its aims and scope statement stresses a balance between practical and academic concerns. That positioning matters for authors. A purely technical paper with no managerial or policy implication may still be considered if the theory contribution is clear, but the journal's stated purpose is communication across communities: scholars talking to scholars, and scholars talking to people who run organisations or shape policy. Papers that make that translation explicit — stating what a finding means for a manager, a regulator, an investor or an entrepreneur — fit the journal's self-description better than papers written only for a narrow methodological audience.

The journal also fills, in its own description, a niche among business publications by recognising the intricate relationships between areas of business activity. In practice that invites interdisciplinary work: a study of digital payment adoption that is simultaneously about information systems, consumer behaviour and financial inclusion, or a study of sustainability reporting that is simultaneously about accounting, governance and corporate strategy. Authors with cross-cutting manuscripts that struggle to find a home in a single-discipline journal are the natural audience for that scope statement, provided the contribution is still anchored clearly in at least one of the journal's core fields.

Scope in depth: the five core fields

Management

Management is the broadest pillar. Work in this area includes organisational behaviour, human resource management, strategy, entrepreneurship, marketing management, operations and supply chains, leadership, and organisational change. The record on this site lists, among its topic terms, job satisfaction and organisational behaviour and corporate social responsibility reporting, which are useful signals of the kind of applied management research the journal has carried. Papers using survey data from firms, case studies of organisations, and tests of management theory in Middle Eastern, North African and other emerging-economy settings are squarely inside the journal's centre of interest, although submissions are not restricted by geography.

Accounting

Accounting research in the journal spans financial reporting, auditing, governance-related disclosure, sustainability and integrated reporting, and the behavioural side of accounting practice. Because the journal is open access and read by practitioners as well as academics, accounting papers benefit from explaining the reporting or audit implication of a result in plain terms: what would a preparer, auditor or standard setter do differently if the finding is correct? Empirical archival work, experiments and carefully designed surveys all appear in this literature; the common requirement is a clear link between the accounting question and a decision that someone outside the research team actually faces.

Economics

The economics pillar, described in the journal's scope material as including microeconomics and broader economic analysis, covers topics such as monetary policy and its effects, economic growth and development, market dynamics and volatility, and the economics of firms and industries. This site's record lists monetary policy and economic impact, financial markets and investment strategies, and economic growth and development among the journal's recurring themes. Economics submissions should be explicit about identification and data: the readership includes many applied researchers who will look first at whether the empirical design supports the causal or descriptive claim being made.

Management information systems

Management information systems work addresses how organisations adopt, use and gain value from digital technology. Technology adoption and user behaviour is one of the topic terms attached to this record, and it is a productive way to read the MIS pillar: studies of e-commerce, digital banking, enterprise systems, social media use in business, artificial intelligence in organisations, and technology acceptance in settings where infrastructure and digital literacy vary widely. The journal's regional emphasis makes it a plausible home for adoption studies conducted in Arab countries and comparable emerging markets, where findings often qualify models developed in North American or European samples.

Finance

Finance completes the set: corporate finance and governance, banking stability, regulation and efficiency, investment strategies, market behaviour and financial risk. This site's record specifically flags banking stability, regulation and efficiency, which aligns with a substantial body of published work on banks in emerging economies, including diversification and performance studies using panel data over long windows. Finance authors should expect readers to check data provenance, sample construction and robustness carefully, and should present results in a way that a policy maker at a central bank or a risk manager could follow without specialist econometric training.

Open access, fees and licensing — read this carefully

Future Business Journal is a fully open access journal. DOAJ records that it began publishing in open access in 2015, uses a CC BY licence, and that the author retains unrestricted copyright and publishing rights. Springer adds the funding detail that matters most to prospective authors: the journal is supported through an agreement between Springer Nature and the Specialized Presidential Council for Education and Scientific Research (Government of Egypt), so author-payable article processing charges do not apply. In DOAJ's wording, there are no publication fees to publish with this journal.

That combination — Springer platform, CC BY, no author charge — is uncommon and valuable, but authors should verify it at the point of submission rather than relying on any third-party profile, including this one. Agreements of this kind can change, can be limited to particular periods, and can interact with an author's own institutional or funder arrangements. Check the journal's current fees and funding page on Springer before submitting, keep a copy of the terms shown to you during submission, and confirm which licence version will apply to your article. If your funder requires a specific licence or a specific repository deposit, raise that at submission, not after acceptance.

Archiving is documented in DOAJ: articles are digitally archived in CLOCKSS and Portico, and in a national library collection (Koninklijke Bibliotheek), and articles carry a DOI as their permanent identifier. For authors, that means the open access copy is not dependent on a single web page staying live; preservation is handled through recognised dark-archive and library arrangements.

Editorial leadership and peer review

Springer's journal pages list Marianne W. Lewis as Editor-in-Chief and Ghada Refaat El Said as Executive Editor, supported by an editorial board that Springer describes as diverse and international, drawn from reputable institutions. Editorial boards for journals of this size change over time, so treat any names in a profile as a snapshot and consult the live board page when deciding, for example, whether a particular associate editor handles your subfield, or whether a potential reviewer conflict exists.

DOAJ describes the review model as double anonymous peer review, and states that the journal checks for plagiarism. Double anonymous review has practical consequences for manuscript preparation: the main document must be anonymised, self-citations should be handled so they do not identify the authors, file metadata should be cleaned, and acknowledgements that name funders or colleagues may need to be held back until acceptance, subject to the journal's own instructions. DOAJ also gives an average expectation of about nine weeks from submission to publication; Springer's own metric, by contrast, is a median of ten days from submission to first decision. Those two figures measure different stages — a first editorial decision is not the same event as publication — and authors should not read the ten-day median as a promise of acceptance or of a full review outcome in ten days. Desk decisions are fast at most journals, and a median dominated by early decisions can look very different from the experience of a paper that goes through two rounds of external review.

Indexing and discoverability

Springer lists the journal as abstracted and indexed in a wide range of services, including DOAJ, the Emerging Sources Citation Index, Dimensions, EBSCO, ProQuest, CNKI, Google Scholar, CLOCKSS and Portico among others. DOAJ independently confirms the journal's open access listing. The Emerging Sources Citation Index listing is the point authors most often ask about, because it connects the journal to the Web of Science ecosystem; Springer currently displays a Journal Impact Factor of 3.7 for 2025 and a five-year figure of 4.1 for 2025 on its journal home page. Those are the publisher's displayed values at the time this profile was researched and they will be superseded by later Journal Citation Reports releases, so anyone making a promotion, tenure or funding decision should confirm the current figure in the official Journal Citation Reports rather than in a directory profile.

Discoverability in practice is helped by three features of the Springer platform: DOIs registered through Crossref, structured abstracts and references that feed citation databases, and full-text indexing by Google Scholar. Authors can help their own articles by writing an abstract that states the question, data, method and finding in concrete terms, choosing keywords that a practitioner might actually search for, and using the journal's standard title and ISSN details correctly in their own CV and repository deposits.

Metrics in context

This site's record gives the journal an H-index of 58. An H-index of that size indicates a substantial body of work that has been cited repeatedly over time, but it is a cumulative, field-dependent measure and it is not interchangeable with a Journal Impact Factor, a CiteScore or a quartile. Business and management is a large, fast-citing literature, so H-index values tend to run higher than in small humanities fields; comparisons are meaningful only inside the same broad area and using the same database and date. Springer separately displays downloads of about two million for 2025, which is a readership signal rather than a citation signal: it tells you the platform reaches many readers, not that any individual article will be downloaded or cited at a particular rate.

The sensible way to use these numbers is as a screening device. They establish that the journal is established, indexed, read and cited. They do not establish that it is the right journal for a specific paper. Fit of scope, quality of the editorial process, the audience you actually want, and the journal's treatment of similar papers in the last two years are all more predictive of a good outcome than any single metric.

Who should — and should not — submit

Strong candidates are: authors with empirical or theoretical work in management, accounting, economics, management information systems or finance who want an open access outlet with no author charge; researchers studying firms, banks, markets or technology adoption in Egypt, the wider Arab world or other emerging economies who want a journal that explicitly welcomes that focus while publishing internationally; interdisciplinary teams whose paper crosses, for example, accounting and information systems; and early-career researchers who need a legitimate, indexed journal with a documented double anonymous process.

Weaker candidates are: papers whose contribution is entirely outside business and economics; purely clinical, engineering or natural-science work with no business application; manuscripts that are essentially local case descriptions with no theoretical or comparative claim, unless the case is used to test or extend an idea others can use; and authors who need a journal in a specific citation index category that this journal does not hold — always verify the exact index and category your institution requires before submitting, because index coverage changes and near-miss assumptions are a common source of disappointment.

Preparing a submission

Start from Springer's submission guidelines for the journal, which govern structure, references, statements and file formats, and follow them exactly rather than reusing a manuscript formatted for another publisher. Write a title that names the phenomenon and, where relevant, the context, since the journal's readers browse across subfields. In the introduction, state the practical as well as the academic problem. In the methods section, describe data sources and sample selection in enough detail that another researcher could judge comparability with their own setting. Include the declarations Springer requires — competing interests, funding, data availability and author contributions — even when the answer is that none apply; missing declarations are a frequent cause of administrative return.

Because review is double anonymous, prepare the anonymised manuscript and any separate title page as the submission system requests. Because the journal checks for plagiarism, quote and cite sources precisely, avoid recycling text from your own earlier papers without disclosure, and check that any reused instrument, scale or figure is properly attributed and, where needed, permitted. Finally, before submitting, read two or three recent articles in your subfield in the journal: they are the best evidence of expected length, tone, table presentation and the level of practical discussion the editors currently favour.

Audience and community

The journal's intended community bridges universities, policy institutions and practising managers, and its open access model means that community can actually read what is published without a subscription barrier — a point of real significance for readers in institutions and countries where library budgets are constrained. For an author, that means a paper on, say, small-business finance or digital adoption can plausibly be read by the bankers, officials and firm owners it describes, not only by other academics. Writing with that second audience in mind — defining specialist terms, explaining measures, avoiding unnecessary jargon — is not a dilution of scholarship here; it is what the journal's stated purpose asks for.

Strengths, limitations and cautions

Strengths, on verified evidence, include: a major international publisher's platform and preservation arrangements; full open access under CC BY with no author-payable charge under the current funding agreement; indexing that includes DOAJ and the Emerging Sources Citation Index; displayed citation metrics that have risen to a Journal Impact Factor of 3.7 (2025) on Springer's page; and a clear, broad scope that welcomes interdisciplinary and emerging-economy work.

Limitations and cautions are equally part of an honest profile. A broad scope means the journal competes with many specialist titles, and some readers will still prefer a field journal for a narrowly technical contribution. Displayed metrics are publisher-reported snapshots that must be rechecked for formal decisions. The no-charge arrangement depends on an external funding agreement and should be reconfirmed at submission. And the historic description of the journal as bi-annual, which still circulates on secondary sites, does not match the current continuous, article-by-article publication pattern visible on Springer — a reminder to trust the live journal site over aggregators when the two disagree. Where a fact about this journal could not be verified from Springer, DOAJ or this site's own record during the preparation of this profile, it has been left out rather than filled in by guesswork.

Frequently asked questions

Is Future Business Journal open access?

Yes. It is published open access, DOAJ lists it, the licence is CC BY, and authors retain unrestricted copyright according to DOAJ.

Does it charge authors?

Springer states that author-payable article processing charges do not apply because the charge is covered under an agreement with the Specialized Presidential Council for Education and Scientific Research (Government of Egypt). Recheck the live fees page before submitting in case the agreement changes.

What subjects does it cover?

Management, accounting, economics, management information systems and finance, including interdisciplinary work that connects those areas and work with a practical or policy application.

Is it the official journal of a university?

Springer describes it as the official journal of Future University in Egypt, while publication is handled through Springer Nature's SpringerOpen programme.

How is peer review organised?

DOAJ describes double anonymous peer review, and notes that the journal checks for plagiarism. Prepare an anonymised manuscript accordingly.

Which ISSN should I cite?

Print ISSN 2314-7202 and electronic ISSN 2314-7210, as listed by Springer. Some secondary sites reverse those labels; follow Springer.

How fast is it?

Springer displays a median of ten days to first decision, while DOAJ gives an average of about nine weeks from submission to publication. These measure different stages, individual manuscripts vary, and neither figure is a guarantee.

Summary

Future Business Journal is an established, open access SpringerOpen title, owned academically by Future University in Egypt, covering the main business disciplines with a practical and policy-facing orientation and a welcome for research on Arab countries within an international authorship. Its verified combination of CC BY licensing, no author charge under the current Egyptian funding agreement, double anonymous review, DOAJ and Emerging Sources Citation Index listing, and a displayed 2025 Journal Impact Factor of 3.7 makes it a serious option for business researchers — provided the paper fits the scope, is prepared to Springer's guidelines, and the author rechecks fees, indexing and metrics on the live journal site at the moment of submission.