All reviews received by SciRev

Motivation: The status of the manuscript did not change at all from the time of submission until we decided to withdraw it, nearly seven months later. Multiple inquiries about the status were sent to the administrator, associate editor, and editor-in-chief, but only the initial two were responded to by the administrator. It seems that the manuscript never entered the review process.

Motivation: While the Editor was assigned since 14 March, the paper was not sent to any reviewers since then. After waiting for 3 months and confirming the publication dates of many papers on the journal, I notice that a lot of paper took 7-9 months (some even took 1 year or more) for reviewing. While I think that the Review quality is good after reading peer review reports, I could not wait for the journal due to needing the paper to be accepted to graduate. That is why I decided to withdrawn the paper and send to another journal.

Motivation: "The review process was too long, and the support team was very unprofessional. We emailed them multiple times to inquire about the review process, but they responded with the exact same message three times. Meanwhile, there was no progress on the paper, and the editor did nothing to help accelerate the review process despite our repeated requests.

Motivation: Four months after submission, our manuscript was still with the editor. I wrote several times to the editors in chief and the publisher agent to ask what was happening. After four months, the paper was at last sent to reviewers, I am not sure how many. Four months later, the tracking system was informing me that the one reviewer had sent his/her comments. No other reviewers were in the process (it indicated that one other reviewer did not accept to review). Again, I sent several emails to inquire. I was told first that a decision will be taken with this one reviewer. Nothing happened. I inquired again. I was told to be patient. After four months, the tracking system was indicating no sign of activity. I had no responses or reactions from the editors in chief. After 10 months, we decided to withdraw our paper. The Publisher agents were very responsive (I probably had emails with 6 of them), but basically could only tell me to be patient. The editors in chief never ever reacted. Very disappointing. I can understand the challenge of finding reviewers, but a minimum communication would have been appreciated. I even started to doubt if the editors in chief really existed... which is probably just my frustration (but who knows).

Motivation: Excessive length of time for reviews that requested extremely minor changes. Editor was unresponsive during the entire process.

Motivation: We received three reviews on the paper. Two were very constructive, offering helpful insights, while the third came from a reviewer who mainly picked up on a few keywords and concluded that the topic was uninteresting and lacking in novelty. This third reviewer provided no constructive feedback, offering only a few sentences.

After revision, the paper was sent back to this reviewer, likely because the other two recommended only minor revisions. However, this reviewer again suggested rejection, stating that their initial "points" had not been addressed, though the reviewers feedback consisted of critical remarks rather than specific points. We did provide a point-by-point response to their brief comments.

Following this round, the manuscript was reviewed by the editorial board, which took about two weeks to reach an acceptance decision.

Motivation: It's too slow, taking more than one year from the submission to the final decision. Also, it took more than two months for production the published version. Not all reviewers were professional and familiar with the field and method that my paper focused and employed, some of whom even asked me to explain basic statistical method. Although my paper had been accepted, perhaps I cannot recommend to submit a paper there, especially in situations where high timeliness is required.

Motivation: In a multi-round review process, one reviewer did not see/receive the letter response to their review. Due to this, the next two rounds of review were repetitive and inconsistent. With a split review (one suggesting acceptance and the other suggesting major revisions / rejection), we would expect intervention from the handling editor, through sharing their perspective OR inviting a third reviewer. It seemed that the handling editor did not want to invest time in the article/ was not interested. If this was the case, it could've saved us the two year review process with an earlier rejection.

Motivation: After a year and a half after initial submission, and 2 rounds of reviews, we kept receiving the same reviews from the same reviewer, despite having politely replied multiple times explaining why we were in disagreement with the reviewer. The reviewer fundamentally disagreed with us on some aspects, and they would not budge despite two rounds of reviews and two rebuttal letters.
The editors have been APPALLING throughout all this, never responding to our emails and basically ignoring us for the whole time. We ended up withdrawing the manuscript, and even this took months, and was only accomplished when we contacted the editorial office (specifically Lizzy Seal, who was nice and helpful).
Do not publish with this journal! Stay clear! So many other better outputs around

Motivation: In the last round one reviewer did not disclose to us some concerns, but only confidentially with the editor. The editor asked for and expert advise from a 5th (5th!!!!!) reviewer.
Another reviewer had still one comment and we answered to it by email to the editor (who never answered in that regard).

We got rejected without actually knowing why since one of the reviewer did not disclose his/her concerns with us.

The handling of the manuscript was really poor and unethical. Further we satisfied 3 out of 4 reviewers, one one did not disclose the last concerns with us. Really unfair and unethical behavior from both reviewer and editor.

Only few comments did actually improved the manuscript, the rest was really "unexpert" comments.

Motivation: Reviews very of good quality, but very slow review process. In addition, a minor revision was treated as resubmission and took almost 9 months again to be reviewed (was send out to a new reviewer although same referee and editor could have easily and much more efficiently checked it).

Motivation: The review process in the beginning at Nature Communications was acceptable, though the timeline was quite long, and we found the quality of reviewers to be mixed. Our manuscript was evaluated by four reviewers. Reviewers #1 and #2 were neutral, while Reviewers #3 and #4 provided positive feedback. After addressing their comments with new fitting data and additional experiments, Reviewer #1 and #4 accepted the manuscript, but Reviewers #2 and #3 raised concerns about certain fitting results. We responded thoroughly, and while Reviewer #2 was satisfied, Reviewer #3 remained unconvinced. Reviewer #3 appeared biased, as our XPS fitting method differed from his own work; he cited two of his publications, suggesting a lack of objectivity and a shift in stance from his initial positive feedback.

The editor ultimately decided to reject the paper, despite three reviewers being in favor. This decision felt imbalanced, as the editor leaned heavily on Reviewer #3’s opinion, discounting the other three reviewers. We filed an appeal, but unfortunately, it took two months to receive a response, and after almost a year in the review process, the novelty of our work risked becoming outdated.

Following the appeal, our manuscript went to external review. It took another month to secure a reviewer, who then submitted feedback on the same day they were assigned!!!. This new Reviewer #5’s comments were cursory, agreeing with Reviewer #3 and providing three points. Firstly, they compared our work with two previous studies, but the comparison lacked depth and misinterpreted both our manuscript and the prior work. Secondly, the reviewer was unable to distinguish between data with and without iR compensation, leading to unfounded claims of contradiction. Finally, they expressed doubts about our Raman spectra explanation, despite it being well-supported by references and additional experiments.
This experience was quite disappointing, leaving us disheartened by the apparent lack of expertise shown by both the editor and reviewers at the journal.
It’s possible that our lack of prior publications in Nature Communications may have influenced the fairness of the editor and reviewers in handling our submission.

Motivation: Based on the feedback received, the process was editorially vs. peer-driven, as all peer reviewers gave generally positive and encouraging assessments. The ultimate reason for rejection given was present from the first submission. Ethically speaking, if this was an issue for the journal, the manuscript should have been rejected in the first round instead of requesting we go through multiple rounds of review, telling us we did a good job, and then rejecting us. Now, our results are no longer timely, and we will have more difficulty publishing elsewhere.

Motivation: Both reviews were written by reviewers from a different field than our paper, which made mostly methodological comments, as a result these were mostly irrelevant. To show an analogy, it is like writing a paper on petrology, and getting reviews from a soil specialist. Awkward.

Motivation: rejected by autism ATT

Motivation: My experience with STOTEN was the worst journal interaction I have ever had. We chose STOTENT for several reasons, one being a reputation for fast handling. We submitted our manuscript, which was sent to review within 2 weeks. 4 months later we had heard nothing and status indicated 0 reviews completed. Several email inquiries got us no information. Eventually, after threatening to retract the paper, I was told they would find new reviewers. After 5 months, I inquired again, and was told they were still looking for reviewers. After 6 months I stated I would retract the paper if there was no decision. Finally, they stated after 6 months they had managed to obtain 1 reviewer report. The reviewer report was OK. The reviewer made 3 or 4 arguments/suggestions that I thought were important and very relevant for ensuring the quality of our paper. However, the reviewer made several other comments that made me question whether they had read the paper at all. The reviewer was clearly unfamiliar with the literature/methods related to our manuscript but they seemed to brush that to the side and said we used too many "unfamiliar" indices and that they weren't convinced by all this "new stuff." Overall the review was critical but it wasn't all that negative. However, the editor rejected our paper flat out with no chance for resubmission stating that our manuscript was not of sufficient interest for STOTEN and that it would be better fit for a topic specific journal. So, what aggravates me about this - the editor could have made that decision immediately without any reviews. They waited 6 months to obtain 1 review that said nothing about the novelty or fit of our manuscript for the journal and then decided to reject it on that basis. They literally wasted 6 months of our time. Both the handling editor and associate editor completely ignored us during review and clearly did not do their job. As an editor myself, I was really displeased with the quality of the editors. To state again, I could not be more dissatisfied with my experience here. I will not review for, or submit to, this journal again.

Motivation: One reviewer reviewed the work very highly (ranked it very high). Second reviewer wanted us to change our entire course of experimentation in a direction we had already shown within the work as unnecessary, and offered some meaningless other suggestions. This reviewer also asked for some results that were in the manuscript. Third reviewer said this is like other work in the literature, apparently without care or regard of what has been achieved. Two of the three reviews were absolutely third rate. But this seemed adequate for the "Editor" to reject. A detailed rebuttal was sent to the "Editor" but it was not considered seriously. Bad experience with this journal (just like with Angewandte Chemie International Edition).