I have submitted a manuscript to a journal, but after 14 months they have not given me any answer while I have sent email to them many times. Now, What can I do?
(I only received a revision 12 months ago, and after I sent the revise version of the manuscript, I have not received any response. Also, a mailed them many times to everyone who I can find his/her email, but no response. It's current status is under review.)
I was an ejournal senior editor for four years. Although few of them are really professionally acceptable, there are numerous confounding factors that can cause a break between an editor and authors. These include unanticipatable reviewer declines, lingering sponsoring institution policy changes including threatened journal cancellations, journal management system breakdowns, and of course, gross editor mismanagement. A submitting author should hold a journal to a published timeline (including any extensions the editor requests and the author formally accepts) and withdraw their manuscript quickly for resubmission elsewhere if that timeline or negotiated extensions) isn't being met. This withdrawal should be written (electronically is fine) with copies to the Journal editor AND the Department Head of the sponsoring department/institution. An acknowledgement from either is to be welcomed but not necessary to terminate the relationship and allow the author to move on. When resubmitting elsewhere, an author may be requested to submit evidence of previous submission termination. I only made this request once (out of 300 manuscript submissions) and it was willingly supplied.
In your conditions I would withdraw the paper. Find the editor surface mail and send a formal withdraw letter explaining your reasons and precisely says that if you have no answers within a month you will consider your paper as withdrawn.
Send the same letter to the editor via email. Wait a month and in case of no answer start submitting elsewhere.
It arrived to a friend. After the surface mail letter, the editor answer that the paper for some unknown reason was simply lost!
It arrives, we can simply hope that it won't arrive too frequently ;-)
although the most simple way, but it is not reasonable to withdraw after 14 months!! There must be a solid reason for this unethical irresponsive behavior of the journal. As an author, you have unveiled your work for a privileged community and your work/ideas might (might be with a low probability but it is a might!) be exploited/hijacked simply by various individuals correlated to the editor-in-chief/editor/guest editor/JEO Assistants/whoever that has access to your submitted paper. Suppose your precious experiments and ideas are studied by members of paper generation business networks that absolutely exist nowadays (call for pubpeer.com researchers' comments to get the picture). Unfortunately the editor who is not committed to make a first decision according to the journal's timeline is not ethical and also not reliable at all, and so is not the journal for employing him/her. There are some legislations such as ethical codes held up by some publishing companies that may help, however not prevalent. In serious cases filing lawsuits against the editorial board or even the publishing company is absolutely helpful, although costly. The scientific community must make a solid plan for such unethical behaviors of some editorial boards.
