All reviews received by SciRev

Motivation: We received a major revision and then the resubmission was accepted by the editor. We heard from 2 reviewers and their comments and suggestions were all spot-on, though some are tough to address. We even got an extension for resubmission from the assisting editors. The process was smooth and rigorous. The requirement of formatting was quite different than other journals in the field though.

Motivation: "In this case, while we do not question the validity of your ..., I am afraid we are not persuaded that your findings represent a sufficiently striking advance to justify publication in Nature Communications." My feeling is that: In earth science, if you want to publish a paper on such journals, you have to choose topics with "large-scale stories" like Earthquakes, Global climate change, Deep mantle or Subduction geodynamics, or Induced earthquakes (the larger the better).

Motivation: It took the journal over three months to obtain the reviews. During that time the journal made no attempts to get in touch or keep us updated about the status of the submission.

Eventually we received three reviews. One reviewer raised "serious issues" by pointing out lack of certain analyses, which actually were already described in the text. Another review was very positive. The third review discussed some issues but felt rather neural. Yet, the editorial decision was still a rejection, which after such a long reviewing process made this experience feel like a complete waste of time.

Motivation: CONTINUED REVIEW FROM PREVIOUS POST:

Exactly one week after we requested to withdraw our manuscript, we received an apology for inappropriate Editor Handling (but not from the Handling Editor!) and with an “offer” of 20% reduction fee for our next published paper! We felt this response way out of place, if not belonging to other activities that are less related to academic publishing...
Needless to say, we politely declined their offer, our paper was formally withdrawn and we finally ended our 47-day “manuscript process” that never even got a first Editorial Decision from the Editor.

COMMENTS FIRST REVIEW:
The manuscript was inadequately handled by the editors. After 40 days of "editorial handling", the manuscript was still "under evaluation". Several messages were sent to the journal to which no reasonable/credible answers were provided. We, the authors, have been passed between two journal managers and they provided inadequate responses. We were even asked to keep reminding them about the delays!
At no point the Editors contacted us. To put it mildly, we considered this approach totally inadequate which proves a lack of consideration for the potential authors.
For this reason, we withdrew the manuscript.
This decision was not done because of being in a hurry to publish the work, but as a protest of lack on consideration to us, the potential contributors to the journal.
Having this experience, I might not be so keen to send manuscripts to this journal in the future.

Motivation: Don't waste your time for the IEEE Access!! It was the worst submission experience in my 7-years career.
We have submitted paper to the Special Section about machine learning. The title of our paper was a perfect match for the scope listed in call for papers. Imagine our surprise when we have received the "out of scope" reject.
We have asked for an explanation, and after a month they have repeated that the paper is "out of scope". We have then asked for an explanation once more, and after a week they have replied that the reject decision is reverted (without explaining anything) and the paper will be considered (reviewed).
After 3-weeks we have received the decision - reject without possibility to resubmit. There were two reviews. One quite constructive and merit (and suggesting the resubmission). The second one, on the other hand, was completely incorrect: the reviewer said that only binary classification was performed, while we have done multi-class classification (10 experiments) and binary classification (2 experiments). Furthermore, the reviewer said data set with more than 5k observations should be used, meanwhile we have used 8 data set with far more than 5k observations! There were 3-4 more comments like this (completely wrong or very general).

Motivation: The editor provided timely, highly engaged, and very constructive comments to help develop our paper before welcoming a second attempt at submission.

Motivation: After 7 weeks under review, the online portal stated 'Awaiting Final Decision' but a day later it was sent back out to more reviewer(s). I felt that there was little need for 4 reviewers. The inclusion of a fourth reviewer did not help improve the manuscript substantially and it only slowed down the review process. Three reviewers would have been plenty. Moreover, at least two of the reviewers did not seem to read the manuscript thoroughly as they asked questions that were clearly addressed in the original manuscript.

Motivation: The comments from reviewers were detailed, constructive, and very thoughtful. The reviewers all showed great interest in the topic and seemed invested in improving the paper. They provided tips for various theoretical perspectives on the paper's topic and also gave recommendations of helpful references that all served to guide us on how the paper can be improved for future submission attempts.

Motivation: The manuscript was rejected even though the journal was calling for papers for a special issue on the manuscript topic.

Motivation: Reviewer 1 recommended approval but the comments were poor, Reviewer 2 recommended rejection but his comments were also poor. The editor recognized that a third review should be obtained, but told us that this could take many more months, so they chose to reject the article.