Reviews for "Scientific Reports"

Motivation: Manuscript took a while to get accepted and took forever to find reviewers. In the end, they found reviewers which gave decent feedback and improved the quality of the manuscript. While the review process itself isn't bad, the journals management was horrendous. For example, they charged the manuscript to my department (which they paid) and confirmed the receipt to me. 2 months later, they sent an invoice saying the payment has not been made. When I told them that and forwarded the details to them, they claimed that they needed more details (like what other details do you need?). Worst of all, they were very lacklustre to even try and locate the payment that has already been made and confirmed by them. When I told them of whom the payment was made from, they simply said "Can you provide details like credit card to confirm?", saying that "We get a lot of manuscripts from [my institution] and therefore it will be difficult for us to locate the payment". You mean to tell me you don't keep track of who and payments and to what manuscript the payment was made to? You simply took the money? They expected me to go and get my department's credit card and provide them details to them. Anyone with a brain cell knows that no department will do that. If not I will just save the details into my account and charge them for anything and everything.

To make matters worse, I left the institute when this happened, so this further complicated matters, of which scientific reports did not seem to bother to care.

Motivation: The editorial handing of our manuscript was unprofessional and extremely slow. The first round of reviews went quickly. We thought one of the reviewers made inappropriate comments and asked the editor not to re-invite that reviewer. The editor did not respect our request. However, our original editor resigned sometime during the second round of review. Therefore the second round of review took over 4 months and several emails to the journal. We responded to the second round of peer review quickly and the editor sent the paper back to one of the reviewers. This review responded quickly and positively, within only a few days. However it still took the journal 2 months to accept our manuscript. Overall the paper should have been in review for 2-3 months, but was instead in review for over 9 months.

Motivation: It took the journal more than 3 weeks to conduct the technical check.

Motivation: I took extremely long time. I had contacted the editorial office but the assistant editor keep send the copy & paste email saying "sorry for delay". So I contacted the customer service team to ask them deal with the delay. I guess if I hadn't contact them, it would have took much longer to get the first revision. The reviewers comment was helpful.

Motivation: We were very satisfied with the entire submission process as well as with our editor and reviewers. All of them were competent in our field. Their suggestions were very helpful and significantly improved the quality of our paper. The entire process was also quick and without any delays.

Motivation: This journal has a very broad range of subjects and has numerous editors. Including the names of editors relevant to your field in your cover letter address or potential reviewers may make the process go more smoothly. In my case, I was happy to have an editor assigned to a well-known researcher in my field whose name I included in my cover letter.
I included five potential reviewers in my cover letter, but it still seems difficult to find a second reviewer, so you may want to provide more potential reviewers.
About two months after the submission, I had yet to receive a response, so I emailed the journal, and they replied that they would prompt the one reviewer whose deadline had passed. The journal’s website states that they aim to make a first decision within 45 days, so if they miss that, you should try emailing them to check on the status.
Initially, I had added a sub-title colon “:” to the title, but the editor indicated that due to accessibility concerns, so it would be safer to follow that.

Motivation: Very long time before first response from editor. In fact, never received a response based on the content.

Motivation: First review round needed 6.4 weeks. This is not so short but I expected longer time would be required for this round. The comments from reviewers are good and contribute to improve my manuscript. Second review round needed 2 weeks and this is acceptable. New submission system they introduced is helpful. Some information of the reviewing progress can be obtained from the system.

Motivation: We resubmitted our revised manuscript with comments to the five reviewers. Then, the handling editor lost communication. The reason was not disclosed. The second round was then abandoned for about six months. I contacted the editorial support team numerous times, but all they said was that the handling editor was still unresponsive. Eventually, the handling editor was changed, and the manuscript was rejected. We wasted our time. TWe will never submit our manuscript to this journal again.

Motivation: The reviewers and chief editor were great. I really appreciate their hard work.

Motivation: The review process took too much time relative to the simplicity of revisions being suggested. There was also a point where the Journal had to find a new editorial board member to handle our manuscript. The dates received, accepted and published appearing in the paper make it appear that the struggle to keep up with the peer review process was on us authors when, in fact, much of the covered period of time is mostly us waiting for the Journal to relay reviewer feedback and editorial decision.

Motivation: The experience with this journal is very positive. The process was very fast. The reviews gave their reports in ten days. The slowest part was the editorial decision after the major. We only had one round. If I had a question, they answered my questions very fast.The reviewers asked for more experiments and more literature review that improved a lot my paper. I am satisfied with this journal. I will submit new papers again for sure.

Motivation: I appreciate the coordinator and handling process in general. However I really disappoint with revieweres response. Out of four reviewers. There is only one reviewer who seem read through my article and provide rational and constructive feedback. The other two seem not read and suggest what indeed written in the article then they provide mainly linguistic problem. However, the most painful reviewer seem only repeatedly negative 'opinion' without any specific learning points.

Motivation: The revision process went very smooth and the editors were eager to accept our request for the extension. It was however reasonable due to the number of requested changes and some problems related to pandemics which impeded our accessibility.

The reviewers were insightful and raised many important questions that directed us in improving the paper. The reviewers were able to
- demonstrate they know the topic from a psychological and medical perspective
- indicate several formal/technical inconsistencies (some of them could have been annoying and therefore we are thankful for their patience and understanding)
- go through our database and make useful suggestions on data interpretation
- encourage us to give more information on the procedure (the manuscript is more transparent)

We slightly disagreed with a few suggestions but, on the whole, their work is much appreciated.

Motivation: The reviewers suggested relevant and straightforward changes. The editor was able to accept the revised manuscript without sending to reviewers again. The only slow step was going from submission to having an editor assigned (few weeks), but after that it proceeded quickly.

Motivation: I did not hear anything from Scientific Reports after 4 months since the initial submission. Upon contacting the journal, I found that they still had not assigned even an editor to handle the manuscript - and according to them, all of their senior editors were busy at the moment.

Since I am not working on any exotic field, lack of professionalism is the only plausible reason for not finding an editor to handle the peer-review process.

Therefore, after 4 lost months my colleagues and I opted to withdraw our manuscript - evidently, we will never submit anything to Scientific Reports or review for this journal again.

Motivation: Six months for an initial review round is quite long, the editor was extremely hands-off (e.g. did not add a single word of text beyond generic responses), and we only received one review, which the online portal said was submitted in May (we received it in August as they were waiting for additional reviews). The reviewer was an expert in the field and added considerably to the manuscript, which made the process worthwhile. Still, I will likely submit to one of the other open-access journals next time.