Latest review
First review round: 36.9 weeks. Overall rating: 1 (bad).
Outcome: Rejected.
Motivation:
The editor took 6 months to decide whether to send the article for external peer review. Six months after receiving the article, he sent it to a reviewer, after we had written to him twice asking for a decision (even though the editor would decide to reject the article without a review, we would prefer this to delaying the process, as his delay in responding was hindering our intention to send the article to another journal). Once the article was sent to an external reviewer, the first review was completed in 18 days. However, the process stalled. A second reviewer was not sought, nor was the decision communicated to the authors. Finally, the editor sent us a rejection decision after we had written to him again asking if what we were experiencing was considered a normal pace.
Our complaint is not about the decision. Of course we respect the decision of the reviewers. Our complaint is about the lack of ethics on the part of the editor who, in particular, delayed the review process and, in the meantime, prevented us from submitting the article to a new journal. This is something that has never happened to us before.
