Well, being positive is definitely desired. At the same time, with the growing number of victims of non-professional editorial decision making not only is causing harm to the affected individuals, but also harming progress of scientific advancement. I hope one day some might start a movement in the form of "#me too" such as "#paper rejected"

I have extensive experience with top journals in my area in Elsevier and Springer both as author and reviewer. What you have labelled as "non-professional practice" is so common with those editors of ALL top journals. Some times, paper does not move from "With Editor" status to "Under Review" for more than 8 months. On the other hand, there are top journals in Elsevier who return the review report to authors within 45 days.

Editors experience a hectic schedule in their academic career. They usually occupy high position in reputed institutions. Everyday, hundreds of messages bombard their mails. It will be difficult and annoying many times. Therefore, if authors pester them with queries, it will only bring a negative result. In my experience and knowledge, asking status of paper at any stage is suicidal. Sometimes, an author is required to wait patiently for more than a year. If an author can not wait, he has to politely withdraw the paper and submit elsewhere. Please note, the acceptance rate in top Elsevier journals is not even 20%. More than 80% manuscripts are either rejected after peer review or disposed without review. Hence, a non-professional rejection is a reward to author's impatience.

Please have a look at a relevant discussion in the following link

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Rejection_by_Editors

Taxon is one of the best taxonomic journals in my field. If the Editors conclude that the manuscript is not suitable for publication they return it immediately, may be with 10 to 15 days. Even if manuscript is rejected they even improve it a bit. If the quality of the manuscript is good but of regional scope, they suggest to publish the paper in any good local journal. These Editors are also extremely busy persons in their academic fields but give due importance to the authors too.

Thank you Subir Bandyopadhyay for sharing the encouraging note. I guess that should be the case. As you noted, an individual should take/accept the position with certain responsibility as an editor. Rate of rejection, time to accept/reject a paper, all count to their (journal's) reputation, because JCR considers these issues. Hence, an editor should not simply reject a paper based on some baseless or irrational ground. Editor's time is precious so the case with an author or a reviewer. Dealing with science needs logical and justified means. There is no reason to advocate an editor's irrational decision making process saying that an editor has "tons" of work load .

A note to Isaac Dinaharan: Congratulations for your extensive achievements being an author and reviewer of reputed journals! Looks like a non-professional (irrational/illogical/baseless) act of an editor should be nodded because an author was impatient (waiting for more than 5 months!). I read the discussion in the link you gave and fully agree with you that there are many acceptable reasons to reject a manuscript (you gave an extensive list). I myself have experienced receiving acceptance/rejection notes from Editors. I must say that my little experience is in no way comparable with your or many other's extensive experience. Yet I am not aggreable with your view that author should be rejected (or rewarded!) based on some irrational/baseless reasons given by the Editor, whether an author was being patient or impatient. Unless some invisible force is there to reward an editor with immunity of their irrational act. My whole focus point is not about the length of time that were taken/needed for the editorial process but the rationality in the decision making process.

I would like to add few more points to make more realistic.

Editors do the job voluntarily. They are not paid for their editorial positions. If such positions are made as appointments by publishers and pay them regularly, they can be held more accountable and responsible for their duties.

The same editor may sometimes act as editor for dozen journals. It makes the situation more complex and practically it is extremely difficult to follow up a particular issue or query.

How many institutions do really reduce the work load of a faculty who serves in an editorial board? I have never come across such policies in an academic environment to reduce the work load for such faculties. If their academic work load is mitigated, it will allow more room to do the job fairly.

Anonymous and inappropriate rejections really annoyed a lot during initial stages of my career. I am accustomed to this research culture and knock the door of next journal immediately. Couple of years ago, our research group had an intense dispute with an associate editor of a leading journal in Elsevier for rejecting a well written and worked manuscript. The Editor-in-Chief immediately jumped into the issue to defend the associate editor since all the associate editors in that panel are his collaborators or students once. The Editor-in-Chief insisted that our manuscript is a scrap. In another couple of months, we managed to publish the same manuscript without any modification in another leading journal in Elsevier. If he sees a manuscript from our group, he rejects instantly. But he constantly sends me reviewer invitation and so far reviewed 26 articles for that journal. Injustice is an inherent feature in any system in this world. Of course, there are good editors as pointed out by Prof. Subir Bandyopadhyay. However, an author will not have peace of mind and climb heights if this injustice can not be tolerated at least to some percentage.

I think, those points you mentioned, are well known reality. The key is, a person should not take the responsibility as an editor if s/he cant do the job in a professional manner.

Besides, personally, I did not raise questions about editorial decision until this point of my career - until I experienced an editor accusing me of copying texts from other published work while he had the cross-check (plagiarism) report with him/his office. Either he did not bother to look at the report (or did not understand it). Eventually he rejected the manuscript based on a report that was generated 5 months earlier and "created" a baseless accusation of "copying". This is ridiculous! There is no reason to generalize such practice by pointing to some issues that most of us understand.

Totally agree with Dr. Tariqur Rahman. Just because someone is holding a busy position can't justify the right to be irresponsible at all. I have the experience as well. After 1.5 years of review period, the reviewers found that our English is bad (after the reminder email)! If someone need 1.5 years to dig that findings, I would rather question their English!

i agree with Rabiul , we cannot justify justify the right to be irresponsible just because so called editors are holding many positions and are not paid for their job, so the simple question to this type of editors is why they accept the position if the cannot do the job?

That's a real problem, I had a chance to review of 2-3 SEM papers that was published, I was surprised from the countless errors of the steps and process of conducting such a well designed process, which means one thing.

The question that was raised in this discussion was due to the rejection of a manuscript that I believe was handled in a non-professional manner by an Editor-in-Chief of a journal (having an IF about 1.0..). It is interesting that the same paper is accepted by a journal which has IF 2.39..

By the way, giving the IF of the journals are not meant to use IF as a gold standard to judge the quality of a journal.

Thank you all for participating in the discussion.