Some of the leading publishing houses (Elsevier, IOP,...) practice rejections of manuscripts in form of offer to transfer the submitted article to a journal with a high fee (x*10^4 $, x >1.5) and no impact factor, albeit open access.
The Editor of the first journal (the journal where the author originally submitted the manuscript) inform the author about "promising" perspectives of their manuscript and propose alternative (high-fee-no-impact-fully-open-access journal) without reformatting it, and making available the comments and reviews about the manuscript to the proposed journal "to speed up the process". The Editors also inform the author that their manuscript will also be under review in the second journal and there is no guarantee that it will be published.
I really fail to see any advantage of the "transfer" compared to my "manual" resubmitting with reformatting, except in the case that agreeing for transfer is actually some kind of silent agreement about the mutual interest between the author-with-financial-resources and the publishing company: To publish the article.
My personal opinion about this orbits around something like "big fish hunt in muddy water", but I do not have the data about the number of rejected articles after such transfers....
I do not accept such offers at all. I feel like there is some kind of injustice to the manuscript that you can find another opportunity in a better journal .. I usually do not agree to such offers.
It's a 'legal scam.' Stay away of both journals and the editor in the future.
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