-: So those are the four options.
The authors will learn what happens
and then they need to respond to the decision
and the reviewers' reports.
How do you deal effectively with the reviewers' reports?
You're going to get back a list of comments
from the reviewers.
In my field it's typically two reviewers.
I've had up to four reviewers before.
As you're waiting for a decision,
for fast journals it might be a month,
for slower journals it might be four or five, six months,
be preparing to make revisions,
because you almost always have to make revisions.
It's extremely rare for a paper to be immediately accepted.
Minor revisions are, I consider the best case scenario.
Major revisions are not too bad.
Reject is not that great. (laughs)
But it's not the end of the world.
So be prepared to make revisions or to submit your work
to another journal if you get rejected.
It's kind of tempting to think, "Well who wrote this review?
"Based on what they said I think it's probably
"this person in the field."
But you never know, and it's just really
not worth your time to try to think about that.
How do you respond depending on the decision?
If the paper is accepted, that's great.
Like I have said before, it is pretty rare
for that to happen on the first try.
If it's accepted after revisions,
then you go ahead and acknowledge the editor.
If they're asking for corrections, go ahead and make those.
Then you'll return the corrected version
to the editor by the date.
They'll tell you, "You must have it back within four weeks,"
or whatever the case is for that journal.
So you send it back, and then,
they'll eventually send you galley proofs
that you go through and make sure
everything is formatted correctly.
If it's accepted pending revision,
this is, could be acceptable with minor revisions.
Then if you agree with what the reviewers
are asking you to change, go ahead and make those changes,
and all of the co-authors should approve
of all of these changes.
And then when you resubmit,
you still need another cover letter.
This one is not as big of a deal
because they've already reviewed it.
Just say, "Thank you for your review.
"Here's our resubmitted, here's our revised manuscript."
You need a cover letter, you need the revised version,
and be aware of what your journal wants.
Some journals want a track changes version
and a clean version.
Some just want a clean version.
And you should have list of what changes you made
in response to the reviewers' comments.
If they require you to do further experiments,
take those seriously.
Do that work thoroughly.
Don't just rush through it so that you can
address the comments and get it published,
because that's going to stand over time
as part of the paper, so do those thoroughly.
Make sure they're done correctly.
Now if your paper is rejected, this happens to everyone.
It's not something to be ashamed of.
Well over 50% of the papers are rejected the first time.
It happens to everyone and sometimes it's for the better.
Sometimes you missed something important,
the reviewers catch it, you get rejected,
and you write a better paper afterwards.
So rejection can be a good thing for you.
The peer review process is powerful.
So if you're rejected, take a break,
don't stress out too much, and then go back to work
and make a revised version.
Take those reviewers' comments,
use them to make the paper better, and then resubmit it.
Follow the suggestions of the reviewers.
Don't get mad and call or email the editor.
That won't do you any good in your field.
You don't want to make enemies.
And it's not their fault.
You just have to accept that.
But do read the rejection letter carefully.
Some rejections are just completely no,
we're not going to publish it, ever.
And some of them are asking you to revise it and resubmit.
Sometimes you really can't tell very easily
which one they're suggesting, so read it very carefully.
See if they're asking you to resubmit or not.
Sometimes they don't come right out and say that.
What were the reasons that it was rejected?
Was it outside the scope of the journal?
Okay, that one's easy.
Revise it, submit it to another journal
that's more appropriate.
If it's too long and it needs a lot of changes,
you can revise and resubmit,
or you can revise and submit to another journal.
If there are serious flaws in the paper,
or the evidence is incomplete,
then you need to do more work,
and the reviewers have done you a favor probably
by helping you write a better paper.
And sometimes, not very often,
usually the reviewers are right,
but sometimes they just make a mistake
and they've interpreted something incorrectly.
Usually if that's happening
that's because you didn't write it very clearly,
so consider that.
Rewrite it to make it more clear
and say, respectfully, the reviewers made a mistake
because they misunderstood this part of my paper.
Okay, so that's for rejection.
When you're going to resubmit,
either after minor or major revisions,
what you'll do is write a letter
and this letter should include the responses
to the comments phrased by the reviewers,
or sometimes the editor is also a reviewer of your paper.
They'll have a list of comments.
And so you write a brief letter saying,
"Thank you for your review.
"Here's how we responded to all of your comments."
And so you list those comments one by one.
This was the first comment of the reviewer.
The reviewer says, "On page three line 37,
"the GenBank accession numbers should be matched
"with the isolate designation in Table 2."
So the response to that is, "We have revised
"the designation of the GenBank accession numbers
"in the table in the manuscript.
"Please refer to Table 2."
It can be that simple.
You just say, "This is what we did.
"We changed it to match your suggestion."
Then there's comment number two, comment number three,
comment number four.
You need to address all of those comments.
Okay so,
we have covered the early parts of this process.
We've covered the submission and revision
parts of this process.
We've talked about publishing.
And so we're at the end of the workshop now.
I'd like to open it up for questions at this point.