All reviews received by SciRev

Motivation: Reviewers were favorable in recommending publication (one accept and one suggested a couple of revisions), but the editors rejected it anyway, with no opportunity to revise. Plus, the 6 month review time was unprofessional.

Motivation: Swift review process. After submission of the revised manuscript competent editors assessed the revised version without another round of reviews and accepted it immediately (I figure upon seeing that apt changes were made).

Motivation: Although my article was rejected, the review procedure was very fast, and communication with the journal very efficient

Motivation: Review process was speedy and adequate. However, some editorial details had to be fixed (switching decimal commas to decimal points in figures, to comply with journal style) which proved to be very tardy due to misunderstandings and technical problems. This significantly slowed down the procedure of final acceptance of the article.

Motivation: Very slow review process for just two reviews, which were actually both very positive.

Motivation: Although I was disappointed with the outcome, the decision was fair.

Motivation: There was one very positive review of the first vesion and one negative. For the revision the paper was not sent to the original positive one, and sent to another who was strongly antagonistic. The editors made no justification of the decicion not to permit a further revision to meet the demands of the new reviwer of the revised version.

Motivation: Out of the four reviewers, I got only two reviewers' comments that were in the negative. Both reviewers' pointed out the flaws in the manuscript which they already published just few years back, in one of their earlier papers without any issues. The reviewers' failed to look at the additional contribution of the paper, although it was mentioned in the introduction as well as emphasized in the conclusion. Of course, I agree that there were some limitation in my paper, and I already mentioned those as caveats. However, the reviewers' brought that out as a point of rejection. It's funny, because the earlier paper published by the journal didn't have some of the key aspects (that our paper addressed), both in terms of method and results, however was published. I think the reviewers' comments were somewhat biased. I will not be surprised if on of the reviewer's is the one whose paper we used as the basis to extend and improve on. I thanked the reviewers' and the editors, none the less, although expressing my objections to the first reviewers comments. Using the comments, none the less, I did minor revisions to the manuscript to avoid any confusion, and submitted to another outlet.

Motivation: The reviews took a long time to come back (compared to other venues) and the quality of the reviews was very poor. The LaTeX system used failed repeatedly to build the submission, even though it was written using the journal's own stylesheets and no other modules. The editors were helpful, however as a special issue I am not sure how much this can be generalized from.

Motivation: The article was assigned to an editor, who stated that it was not of interest to the journal. The submitted paper was a mortality study based on workplace conditions, but the editor to which the article was assigned has only published in the field of post-colonial literature analysis. It was difficult to understand why that individual was an editor at this journal.

Motivation: quick process, useful reviews

Motivation: I got referees' report within 8 months and the decision to publish by four more months (rather two months after my submission of the revised version) -within 5 months it was available online as advance access and by next 5 months it was published

Motivation: I was always promtely infromed about any progress in the revision process. The editor was extremely professional and read carefully the manuscript in each step of the revision process. One of the referee reports was very very short and not praticularly useful. However the editor had a lot of very good suggestions which greatly improved the manuscript.

Motivation: I have had papers accepted and rejected at Criminology under the current editorial team—Osgood, Gartner, and Baumer. The team is extremely efficient and professional. The review process is very quick, authors normally receive four reviews, and the reviews are generally thoughtful and knowledgeable. The editors actually read the submitted paper and reviewers’ comments, and they explain which comments are important and which comments are less important. When they have rejected one of my papers, the editors have provided 1-2 pages of comments explaining their decision.

Motivation: The reviewers, at least one of them wanted to reject the paper from the beginning, and he/she attached very much to this idea and consequently followed that. The review was filled alway: i feel that, i feel those thing - nothing objective. It seems pure competition and in that situation he/she had the right to act on this very much.

Motivation: The revision process of this paper submitted to Advanced Robotics, one amongst the dozen of journals in robotics with impact factor nowadays, was quite unique to me. As such, I hope that other authors may bear that in mind as this may be considered as an outlier on the journal's evaluation.

After having two papers accepted at the 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR2011), me, as other authors who had papers accepted at the conference, were invited to submit an extended version of their works to a Special Issue on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics, in the journal of Advanced Robotics. As such, I did so.
As we know, Special Issues do not follow the exact same rules as most regular issues. Typically, external editors are invited to take care of the process and they need to do so faster than usual as there is a tight schedule to maintain. This is why I got worried when I received the following e-mail 3 months after the submission:
"Today the Editorial Committee of Advanced Robotics needs to inform you of the serious trouble we have faced. The server, we have rented, has crushed on 20 June 2012, and on 25 June 2012 we have been informed from the server company that all of the data, including uploaded files as well as the back-up data, have been lost."
In other words, my paper got lost.

Knowing about these deadlines, I tried to resubmit once again to the Special Issue. Unfortunately, despite the considerably positive feedback from the reviewers, 4 months later, the editor-in-chief decided to reject my paper since "it is not clear the proposed methods are useful in search and rescue missions". Nevertheless, the editor-in-chief invited to resubmit it, based on the almost nonexistent reviews, to the regular issue of the journal. The paper was then accepted to the regular issue, without further revisions, 4 months later, and published another 6 months later.

That being said, I do think that this was an exception and I do believe in the quality of the journal. Therefore, I do expect that this experience won't be shared by anyone else.