Journal title
Dur. 1st rev. rnd
Tot. handling time
Imm. rejection time
Num. rev. reports
Report quality
Overall rating
Outcome
n/a
n/a
7 days
n/a
n/a
n/a
Rejected (im.)
Motivation: In my view, scientific journals should not make recommendations to other journals when rejecting a paper, especially when the suggestion is related to an alternative and lucrative marketplace of Open Access "sister" journals that charge amounts of money.
n/a
n/a
1 days
n/a
n/a
n/a
Rejected (im.)
Motivation: critical approaches only
19.7 weeks
29.1 weeks
n/a
2 reports
5
5
Accepted
Motivation: Excellent communication, fast handling, constructive referee reports, great overall experience.
2.3 weeks
2.3 weeks
n/a
4 reports
3
4
Rejected
Motivation: The speed of review was quick. Reviewers commented step by step issues of manuscript with suggestions what have to be improved. Overall impressions of submitting manuscript is positive. Will try to submit new manuscript again.
7.9 weeks
15.4 weeks
n/a
2 reports
4
4
Accepted
Motivation: I have seen comments stating that the Plos One editorial process is quite slow, but while it did take a while for us to publish, it had more to do with addressing the reviewers comments than the editorial process itself. The comments were quite helpful, and the manuscript was greatly improved because of them. It was quite clear that our manuscript was evaluated by specialists in our subject area.
4.0 weeks
9.0 weeks
n/a
2 reports
4
4
Accepted
Motivation: The process was fair and quick. I was a little weirded out by the inclusion of a new reviewer not he second round of reviews. At this point the changes needed where minimal.
n/a
n/a
25 days
n/a
n/a
n/a
Rejected (im.)
Motivation: In my view, the journals should not make recommendations to other journals, especially when the suggestion is related to an alternative and lucrative marketplace of Open Acess "sister" journals that require substantial amounts of processing charges.
Drawn back before first editorial decision after 255.0 days
Drawn back
Motivation: We ultimately made the decision to withdraw our manuscript from this journal due to the excessively long delay in organizing peer review.
22.1 weeks
22.4 weeks
n/a
3 reports
3
2
Accepted
Motivation: JMIR boasts quick turnaround times for first review under 3 months (see: https://www.jmir.org/reviewer/fastTrackStats/). I first contacted the journal 3 months after submission and received no responses from the editor for several weeks. A generic helpdesk staff member pointed me to a JMIR blog article asking authors not to contact the journal before 5 months is up. I did so and the journal still did not respond. I finally received a first decision slightly under 6 months after first submission.
Reviews were of moderate quality. To the journal's credit, subsequent revisions were reviewed within days up until final acceptance.
34.0 weeks
34.0 weeks
n/a
2 reports
0
0
Rejected
Motivation: The most disappointing aspects of the review process were the lack of depth of the review comments and the time it took to review.
2.1 weeks
2.6 weeks
n/a
2 reports
0
0
Rejected
Motivation: The journal seams to be the ideal candidate for gold open access at the first glance, and it keeps its promise of very fast manuscript processing. However, this comes at a price. I cannot blame the journal for the poor quality of the reviews I received (poor in the sense that they did not even try to relate critique to the manuscript, and in parts were not even specific to the research field). What I consider problematic is that editors seam to just forward - and thereby adopt - these reviews whithout prior check at least for basic consistency.
6.6 weeks
6.6 weeks
n/a
1 reports
4
4
Accepted
2.0 weeks
2.0 weeks
n/a
2 reports
3
3
Accepted
n/a
n/a
8 days
n/a
n/a
n/a
Rejected (im.)
5.9 weeks
6.3 weeks
n/a
3 reports
5
5
Accepted
Immediately accepted after 1.7 weeks
Accepted (im.)
6.4 weeks
9.6 weeks
n/a
2 reports
3
3
Accepted
Motivation: Getting the manuscript past the journal's quality check is a nightmare. Quality check takes up to 7 days, and the journal does not hesitate to send back a manuscript due to minuscule formatting issues. Across original submission and revision, we lost maybe 3-4 weeks of time thanks to this headache. The review itself was quick and on point. The reviewers did a great job here.
4.6 weeks
4.6 weeks
n/a
3 reports
5
5
Accepted
n/a
n/a
9 days
n/a
n/a
n/a
Rejected (im.)
10.0 weeks
10.0 weeks
n/a
2 reports
3
3
Rejected
Motivation: We got two review reports. One of them clearly exposed some of the weaknesses of our paper and helped improve the quality and clarity of the manuscript. The other one, however, was rather contemptuous as the referee indicated that he (or she) would not bother commenting the statistical and methodological aspects of the paper because of the small size of the sample. Thus, the second report was not helpful at all. Overall, the review provess was rather satisfying both from the timing and the referees comments perspective.
23.9 weeks
28.2 weeks
n/a
3 reports
1
0
Rejected
Motivation: Extremely slow reviewing process. Not able to find handing editor for two months after submission. The first round of review took about 5 months. One of the three reviewers simply questioned ethics in animal experiment because we collaborated with CROs in China (yes, that was exactly what he wrote as comment). The reviewer was not convinced even we provided information on IACUC approval in the original manuscript and the response to the reviewers later. We were able to address the comments from the two other reviewers and still got rejected. I feel the editor's decision was driven by that specific reviewer. The whole process is painful and it will be my last time of considering this journal.
11.9 weeks
18.0 weeks
n/a
2 reports
4
4
Accepted
Motivation: The editor and reviewers made a number of highly relevant comments, which improved the quality of the manuscript. We were very happy with this aspect.

The only down side of this experience was the rather long period until we received the first round of review (12 weeks - Christmas included, I must admit), when SBB typically asks reviewers to return their reviews within 21 days.
4.9 weeks
6.7 weeks
n/a
3 reports
4
4
Accepted
Motivation: Processing of the manuscript was very fast. Reviews were constructive, yet demanding, and helped to improve the paper.
n/a
n/a
13 days
n/a
n/a
n/a
Rejected (im.)
11.0 weeks
26.4 weeks
n/a
3 reports
4
4
Accepted
9.4 weeks
10.7 weeks
n/a
3 reports
5
5
Accepted
Motivation: The journal provided a timely and very high-quality review process.
5.0 weeks
21.4 weeks
n/a
2 reports
5
5
Accepted
Motivation: Very helpful feedback on how to improve the paper.
n/a
n/a
17 days
n/a
n/a
n/a
Rejected (im.)
n/a
n/a
17 days
n/a
n/a
n/a
Rejected (im.)
31.9 weeks
42.0 weeks
n/a
2 reports
4
4
Accepted
Motivation: The first review round took a long time, but since I was on maternity leave for most of that time it did not matter so much. Moreover, when I contacted the editorial office to ask them about the progress of my submission, apologies were made and satisfactory explanations given. The review reports I received were very helpful and they really improved the paper.
10.0 weeks
10.4 weeks
n/a
2 reports
4
5
Accepted
12.1 weeks
12.1 weeks
n/a
3 reports
3
2
Rejected
Motivation: 2 readers understand the model wrongly
then they did not understand the missing literature references (to what they understood)
the asked for an assessment of the representation
n/a
n/a
2 days
n/a
n/a
n/a
Rejected (im.)
Motivation: action editor's interpretation of the data policy was unexpected and did not seem very reasonable for the methods we used
4.3 weeks
6.3 weeks
n/a
2 reports
2
1
Accepted
4.0 weeks
8.1 weeks
n/a
2 reports
4
4
Accepted
8.4 weeks
8.4 weeks
n/a
3 reports
1
1
Rejected
12.9 weeks
13.0 weeks
n/a
2 reports
3
3
Accepted
Motivation: Our manuscript were assigned with a reference number and sent to the editor took almost 4 weeks after submission. Review process was very strange, because the date of the status was changing every week. After submission of the revision, the manuscript was accepted and published very quick. Editorial process was not so satisfied.
n/a
n/a
30 days
n/a
n/a
n/a
Rejected (im.)
Motivation: This is not my first experience with this journal. Four years ago an editor rejected my journal based on a referee report concerning SOMEONE ELSE'S paper. When I complained he apologized and told me to wait. Three months later I got a rejection again based on a different referee report concerning somebody ELSE'S manuscript again.
This time the paper was simply rejected because it contained no empirical part. However, I can cite several papers in this same journal where the published papers contained no empirical either.
Interestingly, in both cases my paper was handled by the same editor. I doubt if I will ever submit my paper to this journal again.
Immediately accepted after 16.9 weeks
Accepted (im.)
Motivation: No further comments. Excelent peer-review process.
n/a
n/a
12 days
n/a
n/a
n/a
Rejected (im.)
Motivation: The overworked Editor had clearly not either carefully read or understood the manuscript. The rejection letter stated that the manuscript addresses something. However, in reality it addresses something quite different. I don't think is a result of bad writing because I had the manuscript read by scientists from other disciplines and they said that the title, introduction, results and abstract would be enjoyed even by science undergrads. An earlier manuscript of mine rejected here in 3 days but was published at a very prestigious journal, with great reviews. It is not an accident that the overall rating of this journal is ranked at 3.1/5, which is very bad compared to its peer Science Advances. And of course as everyone has stated, there is a lot of delay even for immediate rejections.