I usually take journal rejection letters in stride, but I just had to push back a little after receiving one this week. This is the letter I sent to the journal editor.

Dear Editor,

I was sorry to see this rejection especially after your invitation to revise and resubmit, which I believe we complied with adequately. If your position was that this paper was not publishable in your journal, then professional courtesy would dictate telling us so in a timely manner. The delays in your reviewing process have caused us considerable hardship and now jeopardize our ability to publish the paper elsewhere.

For the record here is the timeline on this paper at your journal: (1) We sent you the original draft on October 11, 2005. (2) After several attempts to inquire about the status of the paper, we finally received a ‘revise and resubmit’ invitation on October 30, 2006 – over one year from the original submission. In this letter, you promised to make a final decision ‘within one month after arrival’. (3) We sent a revised manuscript on December 28, 2006 with a detailed explanation of how we complied with the reviewer’s comments. (4) We received a final rejection on March 7, 2007 stating that our paper “lacks insightful analysis, both in terms of theoretical construct and empirical finding,” and “makes no significant contribution to the development policy.”

Ok. This is not my first rejection nor will it be the last. But if this is your position, I cannot understand why we received the revise and resubmit invitation in the first place or why it took you 16 months to get to this point!

I will definitely tell all of my colleagues to avoid sending papers to your journal in the future.

Regards,

Bob Lawson