Reviews for "Nature Communications"

Motivation: Our submission to this journal was essentially due to the "quick review process" highlighted on the website. However, it took more than 2 weeks for the manuscript to be assigned an editor as indicated by the online portal. While we were fine with that as well, the entire process from this point onwards was just frustrating. For the next 40 days, there was minimal response from the editorial team. We were informed two weeks before our rejection that they would update us if the paper went out for review and finally received our comments after a total of 62 days of review. While the editor apologized for the delay due to lack of reviewers, we were appalled by the language used by the reviewers to describe the study. It was unprofessional and outright rude. While failing to comment on our scientific output, the reviewer harped us for our language skills, was extremely biased towards the data, asked us to perform experiments which were already present in the manuscript and even cited a wrong reference when stating why our study was not interesting enough. The other reviewer provided interesting insights into the study and we appreciated their efforts. However, comments received from the first reviewer definitely impacted our opinion of the journal and their review process.

Motivation: The reviewers raised important points that, once addressed, significantly improved the manuscript. However, the second round of revisions took too long. The first reviewer accepted to revise the manuscript one more time and then apparently vanished into thin air. The editor waited a long time before contacting a replacement reviewer. We had to contact the editor to get feed back. Also, the online manuscript tracking system is not at all informative as our manuscript had been "under consideration" the whole time and never changed status. We are happy with the outcome and appreciated the comments made by the reviewers, but found the overall process very long.

Motivation: Overall the review process did improve and add to the work and paper significantly. But then over 1.25yrs that was bound to happen even without review/editorial comments. Essentially we ended up with 1.5 papers worth of work. By then one of the reviewers - the one who had led to most of grunt work supplementary data addition to the manuscript - was pointing out our own conference abstract which we had presented about parts of the work meanwhile as reason for non-significance & non-novelty! Thankfully the editor didn't care for that one.

Motivation: Very fast editorial rejection, stated reason was that the findings were not "sufficiently striking".

Motivation: There are both advantages and disadvantages to Nat Comms. Upon initial submission, the editor requested that we revise and resubmit. This took three months, and resulted in a much better paper. We then went through two further review rounds, so that it was finally about 8 months before the manuscript was accepted. It then took another two months before publication, which is bizarre given that we submitted publication-ready latex proofs, and this is an online journal. We received good feedback from the reviewers, which ultimately resulted in a much better paper (!), but we agree with other authors, that the process takes far too long. Our eProofs were sent back to us with far too many simple errors to justify the GBP 3,700.00 (tax included) publication fee. Shocking, and makes you wonder how much the Nature management are profiting, at the expense of the copyediting firm in Bangladesh, who actually do the hard work of the production.

If we have one recommendation for the Nat Comms team it is to stop claiming that this is a "rapid communication" type journal. Why claim rapid turnover (one month I think), when the actual review process takes much longer? Claiming it is once month from the point of acceptance to the point of publication is trying to make it look much more rapid than it is.

Still, an excellent journal, and supportive of junior academics.

Motivation: The review process was overall very long, and some of the reviewers' comments were not relevant to our manuscript. The editor was, however, very understanding when it came to decide which additional experiments were needed and which ones were not. Overall, the manuscript's quality improved considerably during the review process, mostly due to the additional experiments we were requested to do.
The proofs of the article required us a thorough review, because several mistakes (e.g. loss of italic, mislabel of references) had been introduced by the company that dealt with the manuscript.

Motivation: The overall handling of manuscript was good, however I didn't like the manuscript tracking in nature communication witch offers much less information about manuscript status then is common in other journals.

Motivation: Reviewer's comments were fair and largely in agreement with each other. They highlighted results in our study that bore too much similarity to earlier research, and that the novel aspects of our study were underexplored.

Motivation: The message they sent was: "I am afraid we are not persuaded that your findings represent a sufficiently striking advance to justify publication in Nature Communications."

Motivation: After the 2nd round of review, the Editor decided to reject the manuscript. Following this we requested an appeal (on December 20th, 2016) given the positive comments of Referees 1 and 2, and our feeling that Referee 3 was biased and that his only interest was to see that a competing hypothesis be not published. The Editor accepted our appeal request on March 3, 2017 and sent again to the same reviewers the revised manuscript. The 3 referees decline the offer to review again the manuscript and the Editor recruited other 2 referees. As alternative for Reviewer #3 chose Referee #5 that is not only a member of the same institute of Referee 3, but he is also part of the same working group: thus, the probability that Referee 5 would have the same conflict of interest as Referee 3 was surely very high. Infact referee 5 suggested rejection and the Editor despite the enthusiastic comments of Referee 4 declined publication of our manuscript .

Motivation: Both reviewers stated, with reasonable justification, that the study was not novel enough for Nature Communications and would possibly be more suitable for a more specialized journal.

Motivation: The reviewers were good and had valid suggestions. The editor was terrible, the overall handling of the manuscript took ages and we had very simple changes to make. It seems like the edito forgot or did not push the reviewers for answers to our comments. Also, after the second revision the reviewers were satisfied but the editor himself decided we had to repeat several experiments. We repeated the experiments, nothing changed in the manuscript or conclusions and still took another 3 weeks to get an answer, and then another 2 weeks for the final acceptance. Every week we e-mailed the editor asking for updates, most times got no reply. Unacceptable that it took so long, will never submit to NatComm again!

Motivation: Very slow editorial decision making and review times for a journal that asks reviewers to send reports in 10 days. After acceptance, multiple back-and-forth changes about text also took considerable amount of time as did final online publication of the paper. In the end, positive outcome in good quality and rigorous journal but be prepared for the editorial process to take much longer than e.g. Cell Press journals.

Motivation: The review process is quite long. The editor decided to send out the manuscript for review after two weeks upon initial submission. We received the comments from reviewers 8 weeks later. It seems that the whole process is time consuming and the manuscript tracking system is clumsy.

Motivation: Manuscript was significantly improved due to suggestions from reviewers and Editor. I was thankful to receive such high-quality suggestions. However, the entire manuscript handling process takes too long! For each round the manuscript is sent out for review, I waited for approximately 2-2.5 months to hear back from Editor (manuscript was sent to reviewers twice). After acceptance notice, I waited 6 weeks to finally see manuscript in online print (returned comments on proofs within 3 days). For the ~5500EUR publication fee, I would expect swifter turn around.

Motivation: In general handling was good. One slight critical thing could be that the overall process took quite substantial time in contrast to other journals.