All reviews received by SciRev

Motivation: I wasted nearly five months waiting for PLOS ONE, and as far as I can tell they never even secured reviewers for the manuscript.

I've been in this business a long time, with 200+ publications and 20,000+ citations. This ain't exactly my first rodeo. But I've never had a publishing experience quite like this before... and I sure hope that I never do again.


Here's the paper trail!

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Me to PLOS ONE (3.5 months after submission):
This manuscript has been under consideration for over twice as long as PLOS ONE's reported median time to first decision. I know that these are pandemic times. Nonetheless, for planning purposes I would like to ask when I should expect to hear back concerning this paper.

____________________________________________________________
PLOS ONE to me (a few days later):
"Thank you for following up and apologies for the delay. The Academic Editor assigned to your manuscript is unfortunately having trouble securing reviewers. This can sometimes happen if, for instance, the reviewers with the appropriate expertise are temporarily unavailable. However, we have reached out to the Academic Editor to help the peer review process proceed smoothly.

If you have any additional reviewer suggestions, we welcome your input. I can pass them along to the Academic Editor for consideration.

Please be assured that we are monitoring the progress of your manuscript and will be in touch again when the Editor has rendered a decision.

If there's anything else I can do to help in the meantime, don't hesitate to reach out.

Kind regards,
Amiel Yebsen G. Pimentel

____________________________________________________________
me to PLOS ONE (immediately after receiving the message above):
Dear Dr. Pimentel,

Thanks for your message, but.... *what*???

It seems that you are telling me that after nearly four months, Plos ONE has not even assigned reviewers for this manuscript. In my over 40 years in academic publishing -- as an author, reviewer, and AE -- I have never heard of such a situation.

If, as you say, Plos ONE has been "monitoring the progress" of the manuscript, how could this situation possibly develop?

You say, "If there's anything else I can do to help in the meantime, don't hesitate to reach out." OK, I'm reaching out. The first thing you can do is to provide a lot more information about the current situation (like a timeline of what has happened with the manuscript so far -- which many other OA journals provide automatically, for all submissions). The second thing you can do is provide regular updates on what is happening with the manuscript going forward.

Given the history of this case so far, saying only that you "will be in touch again when the Editor has rendered a decision" (which could be, at this rate, several years from now?) is not nearly enough.

Your web site promises that "The journal office will follow up... and keep you informed if there are delays". That has clearly not happened here.

____________________________________________________________
PLOS ONE to me (a few days later):
Thank you for reaching out. I've passed your message onto a senior colleague, who will follow up on this matter shortly.

If you have any questions in the meantime, please don't hesitate to let me know.

Kind regards,

Naomi De Guzman

____________________________________________________________
me to PLOS ONE (after hearing nothing for a week):
You sent this message a week ago, and since then it's been radio silence from Plos One.

What does Plos One mean by following up on a matter "shortly"?

I have been involved in scientific publishing for years, and I have never seen anything like this. I wanted to believe that the horror stories at https://scirev.org/reviews/plos-one/ were anomalies, but I am starting to see where they come from.


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me to PLOS ONE (after hearing nothing for almost two more weeks):
It is now over four months since submission, and apparently you have not even secured reviewers for this manuscript yet.

I heard absolutely nothing about the status of this manuscript until I queried you on February 13th.

On February 18th, you wrote to me saying "I've passed your message onto a senior colleague, who will follow up on this matter shortly."

I heard absolutely nothing, so a week later I queried you to ask what you meant by "shortly".

Nearly two more weeks have passed, with absolutely no follow-up from your side.

I have been active in scientific publishing for decades -- as an author, editor, and reviewer -- and I have never seen anything like this.

I am therefore withdrawing my manuscript and will be submitting it elsewhere.

This has been a huge waste of time and I will be warning colleagues about my experience with PLoS ONE.

Motivation: Very slow editorial process that could be considered a total failure. It took 6 months to get 2 reviews. Reviews received were incorrect and based on technical errors and obvious bias. The rejection was appealed, and a resubmission requested accepted for consideration - this took another 2.5 months for a response. The rejection was upheld on the grounds that the manuscript was "uncompetitive" relative to other submissions, and due to comments from reviewers directly to the editors. It is unclear why so much time (8.5 months) was required to consider the submission if it was (subjectively) uncompetitive, but it is clear from this, and related materials published recently, that the review process is based on low quality, technically inaccurate, biased reviews and capricious decision making.

Motivation: The initial decision was a reject with resubmission encouraged. The associate editor had read the manuscript carefully and highlighted some issues that they thought reviewers would find problematic. We fixed these issues and resubmitted two months later (Dec 28th 2021). It then went out to review and reviews were returned Feb 8th 2022 with a decision of Accept with Minor revisions. We took two weeks to make the minor revisions and after resubmission the manuscript was accepted outright in less than 24 hours. Working with this journal was an absolute pleasure - the editor gave frank comments that greatly improved the manuscript, which after resubmission was reviewed very favorably.

Motivation: After submission, our manuscript had to wait about 5 months even without being assigned to an editor. After about 3 months of review, we got only 1 review of rejection.

Motivation: Not super fast, but the process was generally smooth.

Motivation: Fast rejection with few / no reasons

Motivation: IJGIS has a great reputation in the field for a reason. The editors were meticulous and responsible (checking each paper in detail, together with the code and data) and have promptly replied to our emails, and the reviewers were pretty good: insightful, fair, comprehensive, and genuinely inclined to help to improve the paper and see it published. Their comments have certainly contributed to improving the paper. The downsides are that the first round of the reviews took more time than it should (4 months), and that the publisher (Taylor & Francis) took a long time to publish the paper online, and made many mistakes in the proof of the PDF, e.g. they added errors that didn't exist in the submitted version, and they sent us a proof with the repeated errors despite being clearly instructed to fix them. The provided link for free sharing of the article is valid for only 50 readers, in contrast with some other publishers that provide unlimited access during the first month or so. We considered going open access, but the OA fee is unreasonably high. In conclusion, great journal and great editors, but bad publisher.

Motivation: Single reviewer, and no editorial input

Motivation: One month after submission the journal status was still "Submitted to Journal", so I asked about the progress on the submission. After further two weeks I received the rejection.

Motivation: The review process was very smooth and the reviewers really contributed to the improvement of the paper. The only criticism I have is that in the second round of revisions, one reviewer criticized an addition that the other reviewer asked. So the editor could have intervened in this case to settle the situation before getting the reviews back to the authors. Other than that, I really appreciated the review process and the quality of the reviews.

Motivation: The age of my population is too young to be adolescents