How to politely ask the editor to freeze my submission

Question

I am facing an inconvenient situation that I will try to explain as well as I can. Here is my case:

One and a half years ago, I submitted my paper to Journal A. The reviewing process started and I managed to convince three out of four reviewers. All of the reviewers asked the editor to accept my submission. The last reviewer asked me to include an unusual comparison method. I refused to add the non-standard method and the reviewer ask the editor to reject my paper which he did immediately. Being shocked, I wrote an email to the editor asking him to give me a chance to correct the misunderstanding. Not receiving an answer to my email, I decided to submit my paper to Journal B. After a while, the editor of Journal A sent me an email telling me that he has decided to give me another chance. Now, I am facing an unintentional double submission situation. My paper is "With the editor" on Journal B and hasn't yet been sent to the reviewers. Considering that I spent so much time convincing the reviewers of Journal A, I don't want to miss the opportunity of revising my paper in Journal A. Yet, I don't want to mess things up with Journal B because they are a very reputable journal, and I want to work with them in the future.

Now, I want to ask Journal B to freeze my submission to prevent from double submission problem. My problem is that I don't know whether they will understand me or not.

• How would you recommend that I write an email to them?
• Is this kind of situation normal?
• Will they black-list me?
• Will they understand me if I write them honestly?
• Will I lose my chance of submitting other papers to any of the Journals?

Both Journals are very reputable journals and I don't want to get into any problems with any of them.

Answer 1

Write to journal B and say you are withdrawing. You don't have to give reasons, although you could say the submission was premature if you want to. That's all there is to it.

Nothing much is likely to happen with the second journal, since it's fairly common for manuscripts to be withdrawn. Furthermore the status is "with editor", which means they've done almost nothing to the manuscript yet.

Edit: I would not suggest telling journal B that your paper has been rejected by journal A. See:

[What'd you actually highlight would be]: Your paper has been rejected by another journal before (not a good sign; think of it as "if we publish it now, we're actually publishing another journal's rejects, and we're supposed to be a good journal!!")

Answer 2

I think the best is somewhere between the suggestions by Anonymous Physicist and Scott Seidman. Namely, just write to the editor of B and state only the bare facts that are necessary for the editor to know:

Dear Editor, I had submitted paper X to you after receiving a rejection from another journal. However, some time later, they sent me another email saying that they might reconsider their rejection. Due to that, I can no longer proceed with my submission to your journal, and would have to withdraw it. Thank you.

I do not think you should be embarrassed for something you did not do wrong, and it is very important to state that the first journal rejected your submission before you submitted to the second journal.

Answer 3

If you really want to stick with journal A, simply say:

Dear Editor B,

Please withdraw my paper "papername" from consideration. I am sorry for the inconvenience. I am making this request because the editor of another journal has changed their mind.

Do not tell B who A is. Do not resubmit to A until B has confirmed withdrawal.

Answer 4

I'd like to make a point that the other answers aren't touching upon.

You're in a situation, a double submission, that some could interpret as an ethical lapse. Clearly, this was not your intention, and you thought your paper was no longer encumbered by the first journal.

You need to approach this from the perspective of "If this blows up, I may need to be able to show a communication trail to my Dean that clearly shows my trying to resolve the screwup, regardless of the cause of the screwup". The safest way is to assume that down the line, your Dean may be reading every one of your communications on the matter, and thus your communications must put all temptation to investigate further to rest. You need to be clear and unambiguous.

I'd try "Dear Editor B. I submitted the paper to you after receiving communication from Editor A that my submission was no longer under consideration. After that communication was received, I received a message that Editor A revived my review, thus this paper is currently under review by two journals simultaneously. I'm somewhat embarrassed by the situation, and I apologize for the inconvenience, but I would like to withdraw my paper from consideration, and might resubmit it later pending the outcome of my other review."

Collect ALL your communications about this paper to date, along with any response you may receive, and save them.

Answer 5

This is a tough situation, the cause of which is mostly the poor behavior by Journal A. I say "mostly" because of the following point:

Not receiving an answer to my email, I decided to submit my paper to Journal B. After a while, the editor of Journal A sent me an email telling me that he has decided to give me another chance.

It is well known that journals can take a long time to respond to authors' queries (what often seems like -- and probably often is -- too long). To have a conversation like this with an editor, in my experience one must be willing for it to take up to a couple of months. Do you as the author have to wait that long just to continue the conversation? No: you can end it at any time by informing the editor that time constraints have forced you to move on to another journal.

In this case you left your query with Journal A open while submitting to Journal B. Is this a double submission? No, because the status of your paper with Journal A is "rejected." But it does leave the door open for something like this to happen down the road. You probably should have expected to hear something back from the editor eventually; in my experience, that has usually been the case.

Again though, the primary culprit here is Journal A, who seems to be behaving badly: spending a long time processing your paper, rejecting because of a suggestion made by one referee was not followed, while three other referees recommended publication, and then not addressing your concern about this in a timely manner.

I think it is ethical to withdraw from Journal B and resubmit to Journal A. This would be ethical independent of the timing, but because you only submitted to Journal B on Friday -- c'mon, they have not done anything much with your paper since then. I don't think you need to say anything about why you are withdrawing the paper, and I don't think they will ask or care.

I think though that the situation where you withdraw from a second journal to revive business with the first journal is a suboptimal one, to be avoided if possible. I mentioned above what you could have done to avoid this situation and should (I suggest) do next time. I did want to put just one word in for staying with Journal B. I don't know the particulars of your situation: the relative merits of the two journals, how much time you're likely to lose by starting over with your particular paper, and so forth, so staying with Journal A may well be the best decision for you. But again, they've behaved badly. On the one hand, everything else being equal it is best not to reward those who have behaved badly. On the other hand, maybe they will continue to behave badly: it could be that after six months, Journal A decides to re-reject your paper because of the same critique by the same referee, right? You have to decide how likely that is to happen and how you will feel if it does happen.

Good luck.