Hello,
I would like to ask about the experience of other diamond OA journals.
Do you encounter cases where an author submits a manuscript, it goes through editorial assessment and peer review, but after receiving the reviewers’ comments / a request for revisions, the author stops communicating and does not complete the process?
I would be interested to know whether you have any procedures in place for such situations — for example, deadlines for author responses, automatic withdrawal of the manuscript after a certain period of non-communication, a statement of author commitment at submission, or similar measures.
I am asking because one of our journals has seen a growing number of such cases and has therefore started discussing possible fees. Personally, I would be sorry to see the journal move away from the diamond OA model or start considering APCs because of this issue, especially if there are other workable solutions.
We would be very grateful for any experiences, examples of internal policies, or recommendations.
Many thanks,
Lucie
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Dear Lucie,
it might be the case that expectations of reviewers and authors don’t really match and therefore frustration comes in. If reviewers expect that they should recommend extensive revisions whenever feasable and that authors will have the time and endurance to do so then it might be difficult. Maybe better than introducing fees would be first to look closely again at the guidelines for reviewers and for authors to see whether there is a gap. If authors are handing in poor manuscripts and are then surprised that reviewers ask for substantial revisions some of them might react with ghosting. I know, editorial desk reject is always tricky and would need to rely on editorial staff with field expertise and capacities to scan all incoming papers. But as a reviewer I have sometimes thought that papers I was supposed to review should have not even have been sent out for review but returned to authors with the request to improve them first.
Please let us know on this forum how you proceed, this is really interesting.
Best
MArgo
Dear Margo,
Thank you very much for this response. This is a very useful perspective.
I agree that the issue may not be only about author behaviour, but also about possible mismatches between author expectations, reviewer expectations, and the editorial workflow. It may be worth looking at whether some manuscripts are being sent out for review too early, instead of being returned to authors for improvement first. I will pass this suggestion on to the editors, especially the idea of reviewing the author and reviewer guidelines. It may also be useful to check whether some of the withdrawn or abandoned manuscripts were later published elsewhere, this could help us better understand what is happening in these cases.
Thank you again — I will be happy to share any later changes or conclusions with the forum.
Lucie
Dear Lucie, hello,
When I managed a journal, I brought this issue to the director because it was a recurrent problem. We established that the authors had 4 weeks (a month) to make the changes needed. After that, I tried to contact via OJS (the platform we use), and then I contacted via e-mail because the message from OJS could go to SPAM. If, after that, I still didn’t get a response from the authors, we would archive the submission for lack of communication. It is sad to “waste” reviewers who do this work, unfortunately.
I hope this helps.
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