Dur. 1st rev. rnd
Tot. handling time
Imm. rejection time
Num. rev. reports
Report quality
Overall rating
Outcome
Year
13.1 weeks
13.1 weeks
n/a
2 reports
2
4
Rejected
2014
30.4 weeks
47.7 weeks
n/a
2 reports
2
2
Accepted
2012
Motivation: The revision process of this paper submitted to Advanced Robotics, one amongst the dozen of journals in robotics with impact factor nowadays, was quite unique to me. As such, I hope that other authors may bear that in mind as this may be considered as an outlier on the journal's evaluation.

After having two papers accepted at the 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR2011), me, as other authors who had papers accepted at the conference, were invited to submit an extended version of their works to a Special Issue on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics, in the journal of Advanced Robotics. As such, I did so.
As we know, Special Issues do not follow the exact same rules as most regular issues. Typically, external editors are invited to take care of the process and they need to do so faster than usual as there is a tight schedule to maintain. This is why I got worried when I received the following e-mail 3 months after the submission:
"Today the Editorial Committee of Advanced Robotics needs to inform you of the serious trouble we have faced. The server, we have rented, has crushed on 20 June 2012, and on 25 June 2012 we have been informed from the server company that all of the data, including uploaded files as well as the back-up data, have been lost."
In other words, my paper got lost.

Knowing about these deadlines, I tried to resubmit once again to the Special Issue. Unfortunately, despite the considerably positive feedback from the reviewers, 4 months later, the editor-in-chief decided to reject my paper since "it is not clear the proposed methods are useful in search and rescue missions". Nevertheless, the editor-in-chief invited to resubmit it, based on the almost nonexistent reviews, to the regular issue of the journal. The paper was then accepted to the regular issue, without further revisions, 4 months later, and published another 6 months later.

That being said, I do think that this was an exception and I do believe in the quality of the journal. Therefore, I do expect that this experience won't be shared by anyone else.