All reviews received by SciRev

Motivation: We had a tough reviewer, but in the end managed to convince them. The core of the argument is still the same; I'm not sure the article is two years better now, but we got there.

Motivation: We submitted the manuscript in February 2023.
At February 21, 2023, we received a confirmation that the manuscript was successfully submitted.
At May 9, 2023, we informed about the status of the article, and we received a prompt answer that the manuscript was under peer review.
At September 4, 2023, we informed again and received a prompt answer. They aswered that teh review process typically takes 12 to 16 weeks, but that there are occasions during which it takes a little bit longer.
At February 7, 2024, we informed again (this time we also emailed the Editor; not only the editorial assistant). The Editor answered promptly that the article was rejected because they could not find reviewers.
We did not receive any feedback about the contents our article.
However, the Taylor & Francis editorial team was friendly enough to do specific suggestions to send our paper to four low-impact commercial journals of Taylor & Francis.

Motivation: My article was a mechanistic study with crystal structure and to support the claim there was biochemical analysis also. They rejected by saying "it lacks the kind of deep mechanistic insight into fundamental molecular or biochemical processes". In contrast to their view, the paper is all about atomic level mechanistic analysis with crystal structure and kinetic analysis. I really dont have any issue with the rejection as it do not fit the reputation or whatever. But I really felt cheated with the reason they gave. It clearly shows that they have not read the article at all.

Motivation: The editor noted that the manuscript was more geared toward an experimental technique rather than coral reefs themselves and, therefore, would be more suitable elsewhere.

Motivation: The longest review process in my career. I submitted my manuscript in spring of 2022. After 44 days I received an email from the editor-in-chief that he read my manuscript and is sending my paper out for review. 159 days later, I send an email asking if there was any progress with the reviews of my paper. I did not receive an answer. I approached the journal once again in 2023, again without a reaction. Finally, I approached the journal in January 2024 – 20 months after the initial submission. After first receiving a generic reply about the paper being under review, two weeks later, I received a personalized apology from the journal explaining that the delay has been caused by waiting for the second review and that they had to eventually change the reviewer. The deadline for the second review being next month. Finally, after almost 22 months under review, I received two detailed reviews together with a reject decision from the editor. No mentioning of the time it took them to review the paper. To put the long story short – if you would like to have your paper reviewed in a reasonable amount of time, try another journal.

Motivation: The general review process is really good, but the time to the first decision is a bit slow. For the rest, the paper was handled properly.

Motivation: In principle the journal handled our submission well, although there were no status updates between submission and decision.
The quality of the reviews, however, was not what I expected from this journal. The comments were not helpful to revise the manuscript. One of the reviewers even suggested to include references to a number of completely unrelated publications, a practice that I thought was long gone.

Motivation: The communication with the journal was good. The editorial assistent took care that the manuscript, references, figures and so on were made perfect in the administrative phase. There was only one reviewer, but the critical and constructive comments were of good quality and helped to improve the manuscript. There was a delay before we resubmitted the article, but this was due to personal circumstances of the first author.

Motivation: The Editor and Reviewers where very well informed about the subject and handled the paper competently and with high deontological standards.

Motivation: The journal processes are very efficient. They inform you by email or they portal what is happening with the manuscript at every stage.

Motivation: Good service 👍

Motivation: I would like to make a short digression before telling my history. I decided to submit a paper to this journal because I was invited to review a manuscript to that journal. It was a good paper, the editor gave me 45 days to submit my report (that was a fair time) and I recommend acceptance. From the submission to online publication, the entire process took around four months.

My experience can be summarised as follows: The review process was a real nightmare and felt myself disrespected, as an author, by the way things took during the revision process.

I submitted my paper on November 01, 2022. It remained stopped for months, despite several messages I sent to the journal asking for information. I wrote to the system's manager (SM) and also to the editor. The SM usually took long time to reply to me and I always received vague answers. The editor has never answered to me, although the system (any message I wrote was throughout the editorial system) allowed me to choose the editor as the recipient of my message.

Only in August 2022 the paper was sent to review, after 10 months since the submission! After four months (December 2023) I wrote to the editor, asking again for news from my paper and saying that I had submitted my paper more than one year before. On the same day I received a final decision on the manuscript (acceptance), that leads me to wonder the following: if I had not written to the editor, my paper would still continue without any decision. This is a disrespectful treatment to authors and I do not plan to submit any paper to the journal at all.

Motivation: It appears that this was "out of scope", nothing much to argue with that, and we can move on to a different journal. However, before they could desk reject us, they insisted on using the journal template to the letter, which is an utter waste of time.