How to be a Decent Editor
An Editor of a scientific journal has a significant impact on the overall process of scientific production and academic publishing. Two aspects of this important task are the careful selection of the reviewers and a reasonably short processing time.
The third, extremely important aspect, is the letter by which the Editor informs the authors about the decision. And this is the aspect in which many Editors, unfortunately, fail to do a proper service to the community, treating the editorial job as a clerical one, where one simply puts a majority-voting-stamp based on the reviews.
Some years ago I was appointed as an Area Editor in one of the IEEE journals and reflected upon how to instruct the Editors in my group to write decision letter. Here are some thoughts on how to write decent decision letters.
- Writing a decent REJECTION letter is perhaps the most important editorial task, as they can discourage young researchers or endanger a tenure. It is the responsibility of the editor to mitigate the disappointment of the authors upon receiving this letter. The rejection letter should clearly summarize what are the main issues in the paper that could not be repaired by revision and provide some encouraging advice to the authors, for example, how to steer that type of research in the future.
- Upon a MAJOR REVISION, the decision letter should be very clear about what needs to be changed in the revised version. Sometimes the reviewers have contradicting requirements and the Editor should make a verdict about what is important to be accounted for.
- The MINOR REVISION should signal that the small changes are still mandatory and will be checked at least by the editor. This is especially true if the revision is somewhere between minor and major.
- The ACCEPT decision letter is the easiest one and, in most of the cases nothing needs to be added; however, if the editor thinks the paper is exceptional and can be nominated for award, it would mean a lot to the authors to read this in the decision letter.
