Reviews for "PLoS ONE"

Motivation: Good quality reviews but I was hoping for a quicker process. It was not that long however.

Motivation: The paper was under review for almost six months and we only received the comments from one reviewer. Those were good but it was not the speedy review process we had expected. The editorial office was then super quick to make a decision.

Motivation: I do not have any complaining about the speed of the journal. However I am not able to apreciate the reasons for the rejection. Journals, like Plos One, claim that they are not interested in percieved impact. But in my expreience they do, (somewhere in the deep). My manuscript was about genome-wide identification of an enzyme family in a group of single-celled eukaryotes. Editor thinks that blasting for the presence or absence of genes from publicly avaible data is not a primary scientific research (a criterion for publication with PlosONE). But I can show countless number of these kind of studies. Even one published in Plos One. He also found my phylogenetic analyses limited. This sounds to me that editor seeks an impact. Therefore, Plos One and that kind of journals should stop involving the name of Academic Editor in the accepted manuscript. Some "arrogant" editors do not want to be part of a nonimpactful paper. That is my theory.

Motivation: As on previous occassions, Plos One failed to find a willing editor within a reasonable time frame. Hence, we decided to withdraw and has since published it elsewhere.

Motivation: We received one review that was six pages, single-spaced. The review was incoherent with incomplete sentences and we had no idea what the reviewer even wanted. The review contained a misquote of Shakespeare. Because we had no idea what the reviewer even wanted, we chose to withdraw and go to another journal. The paper ended up being published in another journal with a higher impact factor.

Motivation: Nice and professional experience overall. It took 2 weeks to find the editor, but the reviewers returned their reports very quickly. The reports were carefully prepared and they were helpful, better than what I usually I get from specialised journals and conferences in my field. I did not have much interation with the editor, but he was efficient in the process with quick turnarounds. I like the policy that they don't judge the novelty and impact of the work, so in theory a technically and scientifically sound paper cannot be rejected due to the subjective view of a reviewer and/or editor. Once the paper was accepted it was published quicker than my previously published work with Elsevier and other major well-known publishers. I did not give a perfect score because there were some small annoying things: for figures they accept only ancient TIF and EPS formats and the process of their submission is tedious, the LaTeX template supports only rudimentary citing (no \citet command), the manuscript has to be submitted without figures included (which makes it difficult to read and it's non-sense), and the publisher doesn't send the proof of the typeset PDF to authors before publication (so the final published paper may contain errors; mine luckily didn't have any errors but I can imagine errors may happen). Furthermore, once the paper was accepted, the production department returned it to me for very minor things they could fix themselves in a few minutes. Overall, in my case PLOS ONE gave an impression of a serious, professional, well organised and efficient journal and I think that I will submit to PLOS ONE again.

Motivation: Instead of the promised 'one month to review', we waited 3 months. Got an email that they were having trouble finding reviewers after 3 months. Then a few days later, they sent one apparently fairly hasty statistical review. There were several excellent comments that would have been readily addressed. The reviewer's main concern, however, indicate s/he had not read the manuscript very closely (did not understand the main dependent variable despite descriptions in methods and figures). This feels like we did not receive a proper peer review...and waiting this long only to then receive minimal review, is highly disappointing and beneath what I'd expect of PLoS ONE.

Motivation: Our paper was accepted, so my poor ratings are nothing to do with sour grapes. However, the editor did not seem especially well-informed in this subject area. While this can't be expected of a specialist journal, a massive enterprise such as PLoS One, with its legion of Editors, should be able to find a suitable editor (or to accept the Editor recommended by the authors). This caused difficulties because she did not challenge some of the frankly ridiculous comments/requests of one of the reviewers. Instead we had to make more and more changes (5 sets of revisions!), although to my mind the law of (exponential) diminishing returns was evident after the second revision. The Ed contented herself with (reading and then...?) following the requests from the reviewers for continual additional revisions. Eventually in complete exasperation, we challenged the reviewer to 'put up or shut up' and they finally conceded that they lacked unawareness of the literature. At that point I was very willing to withdraw the paper and send it elsewhere.
I also found the editor to be particularly thin skinned and frankly patronising, with her parting comment: "I WOULD LIKE TO CALL YOUR ATTENTION TO ONE ISSUE (WHICH MAY BE OF IMPORTANCE FOR YOUR FUTURE COMMUNICATION WITH EDITORS): all my communication I did address to you (by your name), all your communication to me had been addressed to "[Dear] Editor". I would recommend you to call your future Editors by name. this is just a good communication style" (all caps in original). Now, I agree that it is a courtesy to an Editor to use their name and title, but it is difficult to take lessons about "good communication" from someone who waited until the 6th(!) decision to letter to inform us that her feelings had been hurt! We could have used her name if she pointed out this trivial oversight after letter 1. Moreover the nature of the decision letters (to amend according to the wishes of the reviewers) did nothing to dispel the idea that one was dealing with a nameless automaton. Anyway, no more PLoS submissions for me, I think!

Motivation: The first part of the process was rather smooth, but the story was not finished after the primary acceptance. On January 8th 2016 we were informed that during the technical check a potential competing interest between one of the authors and the manuscript-handling Academic Editor was discovered, as they have co-published together within the last five years. It was the journal who selected the handling editor (who was not among the suggested Academic Editors that we were requested to indicate in the submission form). Therefore it's the journal's full responsibility and conflict of interest issues should have been checked at the start of the submission procedure and not after the evaluation of the manuscript.
On January 11th 2016 we have been informed that our manuscript has been assigned to a new Academic Editor and already on January 12th we got the notice that our manuscript did not meet the criteria for publication and therefore has been rejected, giving a very short and scientifically rather doubtful opinion to which we were not asked to respond, thus overruling the decision of the first editor and the reviewers.
We perceived this procedure as enormously disrespectful towards the authors and the reviewers who deemed the manuscript suitable for publication. After having contacted the senior editors and the journal management team asking for a more detailed explanation regarding their decision, there was no reply until this date (29. 4. 2016).

Motivation: The reviews were of very low quality, we did submit an appeal but after almost 4 months of waiting for an answer we withdraw it

Motivation: The review took five month
The reviews were not good:
- the first reviewer contested the technique of recording (the technique was classic, the reviewer just did not like it)
- the second reviewver major comments were about syntax mistakes

Motivation: It seemed reviewers didn't understand the work.

Motivation: I have decided to share this experience because I have never encountered anything like this before: a journal claiming they could not find an editor after more than two months! And not in some obscure topic (plant biology). This is coming from a journal boasting “speed to publication”… Ridiculous!

Motivation: the review process could be finished in a much shorter period, especially after the first review round. Also the time required from submission to first decision was a bit long.

Motivation: Everything moved very quickly as the reviewer comments were things that we had somewhat expected may be questioned. Comments were mostly minor but extremely helpful.

Motivation: The 1st review process was a little long, however the comments were constructive and just require some re-analysis of experiments already done. The work was improved by doing the suggestions of the three reviewers.