Applied Sciences-Basel

Very professional and efficient, quickly publishing their comprehensive research results and receiving widespread attention. The specialty of this journal lies in completing two rounds of review (including revisions) in just around 30 days, providing a relatively short time for reviewers. After all, those who have served as reviewers understand that it is often considered normal to have more than a month to review, and they often put it aside after confirming the review (self-reflection here), which reduces the efficiency of the scientific research community. In reality, the "true" review time is at most one week.

There were three reviewers this time, two of whom gave very positive evaluations, while the other provided nearly 20 suggestions, leading to significant revisions. This process was a bit tiring, and the author also had a tight schedule for making the modifications.

At the same time, I would like to express my personal opinion. I used to be a fan of traditional journals, but even among the top journals in the industry, including those in the first and second tiers of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, there are many irregularities in the review process. For example, reviewers may upload incorrect review comments (completely unrelated to the article), editors may make decisions directly without proper revisions, and reviewers may lack professionalism and do a perfunctory job (even to the extent of being unreachable for reevaluation).

Regarding the issue of publication fees for open-access journals, in fact, I may not have noticed it before, but I have found that many colleagues have published in some traditional top-tier journals that I carefully examined and discovered to be open-access as well. This means that these journals have also opened up OA choice. But, oh well, as expected, well-known journals like Elsevier charge much higher publication fees for OA compared to MDPI!

These reviewers and editors of this journal are playing games with their attitudes and are not responsible.
Submitted on 16th March 2020; First revision on 2nd May 2020, one major revision, one minor revision, one acceptance with major revision comments in a highlighted PDF, and then nothing happened, which was the first time encountering this; Made serious modifications and after receiving feedback, the reviewer for the minor revision stated acceptance, while the reviewer for the major revision commented: Thank you for addressing one/two comments. However, there were many other important things authors just ignored; Made further revisions and the major revision reviewer's comment was: The authors still take the comments for granted; Finally, rejected.
Thinking about what happened, I contacted the journal to see if I could change reviewers. Their response was: We think your article is very good, but there are still some minor issues, so continue revising and we will assign it to the same reviewer again. I made further revisions for another week, but it was still rejected. By June 28th, it had been 3 and a half months wasted.
Later, I submitted to another journal and unexpectedly it was accepted within a month (mainly because it was free and had a similar impact factor).
In January 2021, I received an email from this journal asking if I had considered re-submitting.
Do you think I might consider submitting again?