International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health

11.28 Submission
12.11 Major revision with three reviewers. One reviewer gave a major revision with 1 "yes" and 5 "can" responses, with sharp questions, questioning the validity of the experiment and requesting additional experiments. The following two revisions were mostly "yes."
12.16 Revisions were made because the experiments were conducted before but were not included in the manuscript due to space constraints. Other parts were also significantly revised. The entire revision process was quite anxious.
12.21 Received a reply email accepting the paper after minor revisions. This time, some grammar errors in the images and text were corrected, which was relatively simple. It was revised and returned on the same day.
There were some minor complications in between (adding new authors), which caused a delay in processing. The journal editor rejected the request to modify the authors, citing MDPI's emphasis on the originality and accuracy of the authors.
12.26 Confirmed the accuracy of the funding information.
12.27 Confirmed the authors' names and emails, and made final modifications to figure captions, symbols, reference formatting, etc.
12.28 Final check.
Overall, this submission went very smoothly, taking only a month from submission to acceptance. The journal is in the WOS1 zone with a moderate impact factor. Additionally, my advisor had a coupon to waive the publication fee, greatly increasing the cost-effectiveness of the journal.
However, if I had to bear the 2500 CHF fee myself, I probably would not have chosen this journal.

Background: I started my second year of graduate school. My thesis was poorly written, but my senior brother successfully submitted an article and recommended me to the editor and my teacher, so it happened to be assigned to me.

Invitation: The teacher informed me that the deadline was the 20th, but I only submitted it on July 22nd.

Review: It was sent within two or three days.

Reviewer's response: The fastest response was on July 29th, and the slowest was on August 6th (on August 10th, the teacher informed me that I needed to make revisions and gave me ten days). The first two reviewers provided comprehensive feedback, requesting that my article be well-rounded. The third reviewer provided thirty comments on grammar and formatting issues. Submitted on August 19th.

Second review: Reviewers 1 and 3 provided approval for publication within two to three days.

Editor's decision: It should be made two days later.

Afterwards, there were final adjustments such as image pixelation, with a 24-hour deadline.

Publication: August 28th.

Slightly over a month, it was fast.