Dear Haitham, I am sorry about what was happened to your manuscript after making lengthly efforts. However, after reading your story, I was not able to locate a fault of the editor, and my personal view is that the editor has made a fair effort to obtain a clear decision from reviewers' feedbacks. Of four reviewers, who were sent out the paper, it is not clear that how many reviewers recommended minor/major revisions in the first round. However, when it comes to the second round, only half of them accepted the paper, but without rejecting your paper the editor has given another chance for you to revise the paper based on the comments of the negative reviewer. After the second round, the paper was rejected again. However, without making the editorial rejection, it has been sent to another reviewer, perhaps because it was not responded by the one of the four reviewers after the first round revisions. However, unfortunately, the new (fifth) reviewer also rejected the paper. Now it is clear that only half of the reviewers have accepted the paper. I think you cannot count the reviewer who did not respond as positive, since we actually do not know what would be his or her views after seeing the revisions after first round. I believe this scenario led the editor to make a negative decision about your paper. I have seen that editors tend to take negative decisions when there are only 50% of positive decisions of reviewers, because of the rules of editorial policy.

Next, if I turned to your actual problem, I believe that 99% of editors of the top level journals are genuine and act according to the editorial policy with assistance of associate/assistant editors and other editorial staff. However, occasionally there could be exceptions like geographical or institutional biaseness.

Receiving notice of rejection of a paper is never pleasant, but for a journal editor, it is not pleasant to have to reject a paper either. We are quite aware of the time, effort and care that go into preparing papers and revisions. Rejections can be based on a number of criteria, which in addition to the peer reviewers' comments, may be related to how closely connected to the journal's core area the paper is, how many papers on a given topic the journal has already published, and whether the paper in question compares favorably or unfavorably to one on a similar topic also under consideration at the same time. Unfortunately, but realistically, other criteria may be considered, such as how likely a given paper is to receive citations, which are quite important for the impact factor of a journal, or how much work the editors will have to do in order to format the paper according to journal standards or edit for language.

The valuable service that peer review offers, even in the case of rejection, are comments and feedback that allow the author to continue to work on and improve the paper. I can tell you that my earliest paper in a scientific journal was sent back back four times for revision before the editor finally accepted it. The lessons that I learned from having to re-write in order to satisfy the editor are ones that I have never forgotten. I received other rejections, but none that taught me as much as those first ones did.

The key is to remain positive, not become discouraged, and to continue to write. Ultimately you will achieve your goal of seeing your article published.

No need to look back. Forget everything. Try to publish in another good journal.

I would rather say that I cannot fault the editor in this process. His method is to strive for objectivity and get some balance. I appreciate your feelings having received rejection notices and notices for major revision on some papers myself. I have always corrected these papers using the reviewers' comments. I have also used the reviewers' comments which sometimes indicate another line of subjectivity/focus from the main line of my own paper to develop other papers out of the data. You should just send the paper as corrected to another journal in order to redeem the paper and salvage what you have invested.