How can I predict the acceptance of an article by publisher?
Applied Predictive Modeling book has a case study of acceptance rate of grant proposals, which was a Kaggle competition. You can get many good ideas from there. 


from the dataset, what kinds of features you would look at
from the book, step-by-step explanations of how to build models
from the Kaggle competition, approaches by the contestants


I think it is very hard to predict the quality of the paper from the text of the paper, but you might have much more luck by including features such as academic rank of the author(s), their past publishing history and success, acceptance rate of the journals the paper was submitted to, and things such as even the length of the paper. Such proxy features for paper quality actually might be very successful...