Thread by @biolumiJEFFence

The massive amount of positive attention that our article has been getting has forced me to reflect a bit on the process of getting this thing published

This has by far been the hardest paper to get published in my career to date

journals.plos.org/plosbiology/ar…

A boring thread:

I first presented this work at @SEBiology back in 2019 in Seville - what a brilliant conference

Photo credit: @Craig_R_White

Soon after, we submitted (a much shorter version of) this paper to Nature as a Comment - after a month and a half, the paper was desk rejected

Following that rejection, we submitted the same manuscript to Nature Climate Change, PNAS, Ecology Letters, Current Biology, & eLife - all taking 4-8 weeks to desk reject

Not broad enough

Six 1+ month desk rejections. Oof!

That's when we decided to give @PLOSBiology a try & oh baby what a great choice that was

The #peerreview process with this journal was sheer brilliance & there are a few things I really want to commend the journal on in handling our manuscript

1. Reviews & editorial decisions:

Initial reviews took abt 2 mos. Editor had secured 4 reviewers: 2 marine ecologists + 2 meta-analysts

Initial reviews = MASSIVE revisions

But reviews were thorough, salient, & manageable

Editor was open to a revision

2. Editorial patience:

The volume & content of the revisions was immense: rewriting, data collection, re-analysis - our response document was 33 single-spaced pages!

As you can imagine, a lot of time & work

It took almost a year to revise but editor was patient + understanding

3. Speed:

After resubmitting such a huge revision, we had additional reviewer comments back in under a month

Nothing major & only minor comments to address

Two other rounds of editorial revisions & our paper was finally accepted, just over a year after submitting

4. Promotion:

The journal's staff saw road value in our work & we worked closely with them to produce a press release & broadly promote our paper

The press contact was super helpful & the journal deserves a lot of credit for this aspect of our paper

5. Embracing controversy:

We didn't want to put a focus on particular authors as a source of the decline effect - we wanted to keep it to the science

But the editors encouraged & asked us for such an analysis knowing very well what it would entail

Big kudos for embracing that

In short I really want to thank the editors of our paper (@RoliRoberts, A. Tanentzap) for seeing value in our work when other journals didn't

Their patience, interest & editorial prowess made the paper considerably better than the original MS & provided for a broad appealing pub

SO if you have an exciting paper & are wondering where to publish it, I would definitely recommend considering @PLOSBiology!

and if you're interested in learning more about the #peerreview of this paper, @PLOSbiology makes the full review process transparent - you can download and read the reviews and responses for our paper here: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/ar…

Finally, I want to give a shout out to @ASanchez_Tojar 7 @DanielWANoble for providing their analytical expertise at the drop of a hat - computing & analyzing effect size magnitudes (i.e., unsigned effect sizes) are much more complex than I originally thought!