“Preoccupations of a Journal Editor”: Still Preoccupied

[...]one factor that was related to rejection rates was the publisher, with journals owned by commercial publishers at that time having higher rejection rates than those owned by professional societies and other nonprofits. Because publishing in journals from commercial publishers was often free at that time, such journals might be flooded with manuscripts by authors seeking to minimize costs, resulting in high rejection rates. When comparing the perceived differences in manuscripts (here and throughout, we use “manuscript” to indicate a paper that has been submitted for review but not yet accepted or rejected) between Monthly Weather Review and Weather and Forecasting, then Chief Editor Bill Gallus asked me whether manuscripts that had three reviewers were more likely to be rejected than those that had two. The evaluation of papers for Monthly Weather Review Batchelor (1981) expounded on the criteria to determine suitability for publication in Journal of Fluid Mechanics, including the subjective criterion of what constituted a significant contribution. The reasons fell into four categories (Fig. 1). Because multiple reasons could have been stated by the editor for the rejection, the numbers in Fig. 1 add up to more than 100%.