A new record in biomedical publishing?
I have recently done a little piece of research on whether professional medical writers improve the quality of biomedical publications, and am now ready to get it published. Sadly, I have just had the paper rejected by the journal PLoS One, but in the process I think I may have set a new publishing record, albeit perhaps not the most prestigious record in the whole world.
The online manuscript submission system of PLoS one gives a detailed timeline of what happens to the manuscript. Here is what the timeline looks like for mine:
| Stage | Start Date |
|---|---|
| Decision Sent to Author | 2010-05-28 05:08:59 |
| Manuscript Rejected | 2010-05-28 05:08:58 |
| Under Review | 2010-05-28 05:07:06 |
| Section Editor Assigned | 2010-05-28 05:07:06 |
| Waiting for Section Editor Assignment | 2010-05-28 05:06:47 |
| Initial QC Complete | 2010-05-28 05:06:46 |
| Initial QC Started | 2010-05-21 07:23:11 |
| Author Approved Converted Files | 2010-05-21 07:23:10 |
| Waiting for Author Approval of Converted Files | 2010-05-21 06:00:06 |
| File Conversion Complete | 2010-05-21 06:00:06 |
| Waiting for File Conversion | 2010-05-21 05:51:18 |
| Waiting for Files to be Sorted | 2010-05-21 05:49:17 |
| Manuscript Submitted | 2010-05-21 05:49:17 |
| Manuscript Files Submitted | 2010-05-21 05:49:17 |
You will notice that it took just 1 minute and 52 seconds after my manuscript was assigned to an editor before it was rejected. My rejection letter also included the phrase "Having discussed the paper with our internal editors", so that 1 minute and 52 seconds presumably also included time for that discussion as well as reading the paper.
Is this a new record for the time taken for a journal to reject a paper?
Adam,
The critical factor may be whether the author's name was included with the manuscript. If so, I would have expected an even quicker response!! ;-)
Best,
art
This is not good...
Hopefully, this is due to a software flaw in the system. If not, this is very bad publicity for the medical peer review process which is already under debate.
If you haven't done so, I would strongly react to this 'sad record' towards PLoS One.
Succes! Looking forward to your publication,
Luc
My research article entitled, "A possible mechanism of abrogating progression of web beyond anti-idiotypic antibody and a non traditional pathway of complement activation" (author - Prof. Hari Mohan Saxena) was published (article Id: WMC00749) in an online international scientific journal (WebMedCentral.com - Immunology) within 1 hour 5 minutes and 9 seconds of submission of the article to the journal. I speculate it could be the fastest publication of an original research article in a scientific journal with the shortest time interval between submission of the article and its publication in the journal. The article was submitted by me online at the journal website on 25 September 2010 at 12:05:18 PM GMT and it was accepted and published on 25 September 2010 at 01:10:27 PM GMT. The article was made accessible to the world on the website of the online journal at the following web address URL: http://www.webmedcentral.com//article_view/749.
[...] One is that they have a very high acceptance rate and are fast (oh boy, are they fast: they took less than 2 minutes to reject my latest paper), so the paper is likely to be published quickly. Submitting to a more [...]
This is not bad. Once we submitted a manuscript and it was under review for almost 3 years, believe me or not!!! As a corresponding author I regularly asked status of the manuscript as well as the reasons for delay. Although my emails were addressed to Editor, only Secretary to Editor replied that the Reviewer did not provide feedback and Editor is too busy. Our manuscript finally was also rejected. I don't know if this behaviour still can be qualified ethical. However, regardless quality of a manuscript, Editor must respect the authors. So, 1 minute and 52 seconds is faster than 3 years.