This article covers guidance for the PEC-SUB-0013 error message. You can find guidance for our other error codes here: PEC Errors.

What does it mean?

Participants on Prolific can only reserve or start one submission at a time. If you try to reserve two submissions at once, you’ll see this error on one of your requests.

Why did this happen?

When you send a request to reserve or start a submission on Prolific, we place a lock on your account to prevent any further submission reservation requests while the first request is processing.

This lock is only in place while we are processing your request to reserve a submission. Once the request is processed the lock is removed, allowing you to complete the submission (or try again if the reservation failed).

This is a preventative measure to ensure each participant has a fair opportunity to access each study.

Can Prolific fix it?

This error will go away automatically in one of two cases (whichever happens first):

• The submission reserve request is completed.
• A certain amount of time has elapsed (measured in seconds).

This means that this issue should go away after a certain amount of time in any case. There is nothing that Prolific can do to speed this process up.

What can I do?

• Only try to reserve a place, one study at a time.
• Only click the reserve / start button again once you have received a response to your first click.

What if I'm still receiving this error?

If you are still receiving this error after a period of more than two hours and have not been able to reserve a place on any study, please contact support by clicking the button below.

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