All reviews received by SciRev

Motivation: Besides the extraordinarily long review time, I strongly suspect that they could not find reviewers. An inquiry was made months after submission, and they replied that they had invited 50 total reviewers to that point. The generic statement in the decision letter was

"Unfortunately, we have determined that the manuscript is not acceptable for publication. We enclose detailed comments below.

AIP Advances covers applied physical science and requires manuscripts to contain original results and to be technically correct. Based on its scope, your manuscript may be more appropriate for another journal."

All this after suggestions from the editors of Applied Physics Letters and the Journal of Applied Physics to submit to them.

Motivation: This is the worst peer review experience I've had thus far. The first round of review was good and smooth and took less than half a year. We got comments from three reviewers, and all of them were positive about the manuscript and gave meaningful suggestions to strengthen the manuscript. We amended the manuscript and resubmitted it accordingly.

It was the second round of review that was extremely terrible and unpleasant. The review took almost one year and a half to complete. We sent several emails to the editorial office requesting information, but did not get any response at all. Eventually, the final decision was a rejection, which we think is extremely unfair:

1) we got comments from only one reviewer, who, apparently, was a new reviewer and not involved in the first round of review - his/her comments were substantially different from those raised by the initial reviewers. While we understand new reviewers could be invited, we expected them to focus on assessing our revisions and whether they sufficiently and appropriately address the initial reviewers' concerns. In fact, it appears that this new reviewer did not read the initial reviewers' comments and our response at all. The decision to reject our revised manuscript based solely on this new reviewer's comments and without considering the initial reviewers' comments and our response is outrightly unfair.

2) the review lacks transparency to such a degree that we can't even clearly know whether the initial reviewers withdrew from the review or whether new reviewers were invited.

3) the comments from the only reviewer are actually not at all that negative. They can be addressed with some more explanations in the manuscript, since he/she is mainly asking for further clarifications/justifications of various constructs. However, we were not given any opportunity to revise the manuscript. This is extremely unfair given that these comments were not raised in the first round of review.

4) no further explanation from the editor is given as to why the decision is a rejection. Actually, we think the reason is that the second round of review took too long and the editor might not want to deal with the manuscript anymore, and so he/she wanted to conclude the process at this point. However, this has nothing to do with the quality of our revised manuscript. I don't think the editor handled our revised manuscript professionally.

Anyways, our impression is that the revised manuscript was handled in a disappointingly unprofessional manner. I would not suggest anyone to publish in this journal.

Motivation: After three rounds of revisions, the paper was finally accepted. The entire process—from submission to publication—took 1 year and 4 months. Although the reviewing process is voluntary, we do pay for the publication. The prolonged waiting time was excessive and concerning. The reviews offered little constructive feedback, and it appeared that our manuscript was neglected for several months.

Motivation: The review process for our manuscript extended over nearly a year. During this time, we contacted the editorial office on three separate occasions to inquire about the status of our submission. Approximately six months post-submission, we were informed that one external review had been completed and that the journal was still in search of a second reviewer. Eventually, nearly a year after submission, we received a decision based on an “in-house review,” stating that the manuscript “does not meet the journal’s editorial needs.” While the decision itself is certainly within the journal’s prerogative, the extended delay—particularly in the absence of full peer review—was disappointing and did not reflect the standard of professionalism we had expected.

Motivation: After a nine month review we got very half-baked short comments, some of which suggested aspects which were already part of the manuscript.

Motivation: My manuscript was under review for over two months before being rejected for lacking molecular validation experiments. If such experiments are a strict requirement, this should be clearly stated before submission, and unsuitable manuscripts should not proceed to full review. I also noticed similar studies without molecular experiments published in the journal, so clarification on this policy would be valuable.

Motivation: The editorial decision was very quick, and since the editor considered the manuscript to be more relevant to a sister journal, a transfer offer was made by the editor

Motivation: The journal has a very slow review process. After 6 months of review, we were given about 3 weeks for major revisions and asked to resubmit the manuscript. The reviews are so superficial and do not contribute to the quality of the manuscript.

Motivation: My manuscript was desk rejected after 33 days without being sent for review. While I understand that my work may not fully meet the high standards of a top-tier journal, the long delay before rejection was disappointing. The editorial process felt inefficient, and the slow decision time left me dissatisfied.

Motivation: The journal states on their website that the submission to first decision time is 28 days (median).

I followed up a number of times and was provided no additional information about progress

Finally over 100 days (3.5 months) later manuscript was rejected and no reason given

Motivation: My manuscript remained “With Editor” for about 77 days before a desk rejection was issued.
The decision letter mentioned a technical problem that delayed the editorial process, but no specific scientific reason for rejection was provided.
Although the editors apologized, this long waiting time without external review is disappointing, especially compared to the journal’s stated average of 17 days to first decision.
Clearer communication and a more efficient handling of submissions would greatly improve the author experience.

Additionally, the Editorial Manager system does not allow authors to contact the handling editor directly.
All correspondence must go through Elsevier’s central support form, which further delays communication and leaves authors uncertain about the real status of their submission.
For young researchers and students involved in the publication process, this lack of transparency and responsiveness can be very discouraging.

Motivation: Transfer offered (Current Biology)

Motivation: The desk rejected the paper very quickly, which is a good thing. They also provide a submission transfer service, offering five recommended journals that can be transferred with one click. However, since most of them are open-access journals, we did not consider them.

Motivation: No response from the editor after 4 months. Sent a couple of emails to the journal asking for updates and if they could get in touch with the editor, but just received a standard generic response.

Motivation: Our experience with journal was so so so bad, we waited for more than half a year after submission, still 'with editor'. Our co-author emailed them twice, no response. After 8 month wait, it was sent to reviewers but finally came back with useless and irrelevant comments indicating reviewer didn't actually read the paper carefully.

Motivation: Editorial decision stated that the work did not represent a sufficient conceptual advance for a general cell biological readership to justify publication in Nature Cell Biology, which leads me to think they did not understand the main message of the manuscript.

Motivation: This manuscript was transferred to Nature Communications at the advice of an editor of another publication within the Nature portfolio. After editorial consideration it was rejected because the editors considered (wrongly) that the manuscript was not sufficiently advanced and would have limited interest.