Reviews for "Scientific Reports"

Motivation: It took about two weeks for the editor to receive the first review, Five months later I enquired about the reason for the lack of progress. The reply was that the editor was still trying to obtain another review. One month after that the editor made a revise and resubmit decision based on the somewhat glowing review of Reviewer 1.Revised and resubmitted the next day and was accepted the day after that.

Motivation: The only main concern in the whole reviewing process was the time. It took a very long time to obtain the first reviewers comments, although from the comments we understand why. One of the reviewer was not fitted for this and only criticized on how it was premature to publish. The second reviewer and the editorial office performed valuable critics and allowed us to further improve the manuscript. The second revision was rather fast (16.1 weeks because we only submitted the revision after summer holidays) and was promptly accepted in two days. When errors occurred in the submission process, the notifications from the editorial office were prompt and eased the whole process.

Motivation: The reviewing process was very slow.

Motivation: Review process overall was quick and helpful, and led to an improved paper.

Motivation: The Editorial Board and few referees did excellent work for improving the manuscript. This journal is excellent and particularly the editorial board members.

Motivation: The experience with Scientific Reports was very mixed; I personally think that 10 weeks is a very long time for a first review;
2 reviewers gave genuinely constructive feedback, with which the manuscript was improved and published in a similarly good journal.
However, 1 reviewer gave overly destructive feedback, with no reason for rejection other than his personal opinion, which could have been proven wrong with a number of references- if the manuscript hadn't been rejected due to his comments. Furthermore things were critisized that were clearly not stated or even implyed as such in the manuscript.
The journal did not answer our email with concerns about this reviewer and references proving his statements wrong.

Motivation: We had 2 good reviewer reports and 1 who wanted rejection. We spent a couple of weeks rewriting and answering extensively every comment. After resubmitting, the Editor did not bother to send our comments to the reviewers, he simply stated that our negative towards performing an experiment made him doubt about the rest of our data even though we reasoned it.

If we had been asked to perform the experiment on a 2nd revision row we would have done it. It is very disappointing that we answered everything the reviewers asked and in the end they did not even get to read it.

Until this last part, the treatment had been very good and the process was quite fast.

Motivation: Scientific Reports advertises fast decision and constructive peer review, but the process is anything but. As other reviews here indicate, each submission requires a 2 week long quality check before it is sent to the editor. If one minute error is found, you have to start over. After the long process of waiting for review reports to come back (~2-3 months each time), the reviewers were clearly not knowledgeable about the subject matter. Comments from one reviewer in particular were not constructive and complained that the paper was not scientifically sound without providing justification. After two rounds of revision and satisfying two out of three reviewers, the editor decided to send the manuscript to a fourth reviewer who ultimately rejected it. Reviewers complained that the findings of the manuscript are not noteworthy even though the journal explicitly states not to make judgement on significance.

Motivation: The review process took a long time relative to other journals of similar quality. At each stage the manuscript had to pass through a quality check that significantly delayed the review process and required all or most of the files to be uploaded again.

Motivation: Overall review process was fair. Reviewers were also fair and asked nice questions, this helped us to improve our manuscript quality.
Please remember Scientific Reports is Nature's journal and so, the manuscript has to follow the natures formatting standards. People complained about the quality check takes time and it does, if manuscript is not properly formatted. You avoid it by submitting proper formatted manuscript in first submission only.

Motivation: The paper was "transferred" from Nature Communications - but this is bogus because it was not transferred at all. Scientific Reports is not tied in to other NPG accounts and required a new upload of all documents plus adding in all the information regarding funding and co-authors (this should have been transferred directly from Nat Comm). The paper was then delayed in being accepted for review due to some minor copy editing issues, and then further delayed because one author was deceased and had no valid email address. The first round of reviews were slow and only asked for minor changes in content. In the second round of reviews, the paper was not accepted because revision was needed to change the title and one figure legend sentence. In any other journal, this would be an "accept" with very minor modifications decision. The final version was followed by an unnecessary "unsubmitting" action at Scientific Reports with no instructions given as to what the issue was. Paper was resubmitted as it was and accepted. The whole process with this journal was exceptionally tedious and aggravating. Our entire team was quite distressed at the length of time needed for the reviews and the silliness in unsubmitting the paper continually. Staff at Sci Rep were apologetic but there seems to be no effort on the part of Scientific Reports to bring the journal up to other NPG journal standards.

Motivation: The reviews was professional, good and fair. However the editorial process is extremely slow and ineffective. First, the editorial office lost a contact with handling editor and it took them more then 2 months to re-assign the manuscript to another editor, Second, in any stage of the submission the manuscript is going through "quality check", which take at least a week. Third, the production of accepted manuscript is extremely slow as well. It took more than two weeks and additional communication with the production staff to get invoice and the proof of the manuscript.

Motivation: 3 critical points:
-After every single of the 4 submissions, we were informed after 5-11 days that the quality check wasn't passed. Each time another tiny point had to be corrected that had been in there from the beginning, instead to inform us about all the points after the 1st check. And checking the corrected points took again up to 7 days each time. This prolonged processing tremendously.
-Instead of the original submission date, the system marked the submission 18 days later.
-After the 3rd submission, we recieved an email with "Final Decision" in the header, but had to resubmit the manuscript again. Though only 3 minor points (typos etc.) had to be corrected, reviewing took a month again.

Motivation: Our paper was not sent to peer review because of unfair desicion of Editorial Board Member who handled our submission. He assessed our paper based on its significance not its scientific and technical soundness. We appealed for this desicion because It is clearly stated in the aim and scope section that "referees and editorial board members will determine whether a paper is scientifically valid, rather than making judgements on significance or whether the submission represents a conceptual advance". However since Scientific Reports allow appeals only after peer reviews, they rejected our appeals as well. We moved on another jornal.

Motivation: It is unacceptable that after 3 months and a half, we received just the comment of one reviewer. We expected two or three referee after such a long time.