Latest review
First review round: 11.6 weeks. Overall rating: 0 (very bad).
Outcome: Accepted.
Motivation:
All in all it took more than a year from submission to publication. The manuscript went through 3 round of reviews, mostly due to one very antagonistic referee that simply should have not been allowed to judge our paper. The reviews became more and more aggressive, to the point that we were accused to doctoring the images (by selecting one very specific timestep in our simulation that would prove our point). Instead of controlling these exchanges, the editor blatantly sided with the referee, supporting the changes he was suggesting and never moderating the conversation (at least not that we could see).
The typesetting of our paper was equally disappointing. The process was outsourced to an external company, in another country, and the first proofread was sent in an email that looked like phishing (not signed on behalf of the journal or the editor or the publisher, for example) and was at first ignored, prompting the journal to contact us to urge us to check the proofread. The typesetting process heavily altered key figures of our paper and changed some of the acronyms that were carefully chosen as a result of the review process. 'Journal standards' were mentioned as the cause of this and although we were consistently asked to return comments within 3 days (impossible given that the authors live in very different time-zones) our queries were answered on timescales of months.
