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Actually, they first bump you down to Nature Communications, which is still relatively prestigious. If it's rejected also there, you get bumped down to Scientif

Actually, they first bump you down to Nature Communications, which is still relatively prestigious. If it's rejected also there, you get bumped down to Scientific Reports (where they've dropped "Nature" from the name). It's not very prestigious and, like e.g. PLOS One, does not require a paper to be particularly novel or groundbreaking. Unless your paper is truly bad, it will get accepted at Scientific Reports if you can afford the publishing fee. Since there have been several reports of essentially nonexistent peer review from the journal, many people are a bit skeptical. Since it's not very prestigious and kind of a last resort for authors, people also tend to be a bit skeptical when papers published there are featured in the mainstream press. However, all scientists will readily acknowledge that the peer review process can often be flawed, so "a bit skeptical" should not be taken as "outright dismissal".

Osmium 10y ago
> Since there have been several reports of essentially nonexistent peer review from the journal, many people are a bit skeptical. Speaking from personal experience (from our own group and also from a colleague), their peer review is no better or worse than any of the other big-name publishers. And, in regards to the OP's comments, I wouldn't consider where a paper is published to be a particularly good indicator of its quality, provided it's at least a well-known/well-established journal (e.g. in the top-20 on Google's rankings for a given field[1]). I've been accepted and rejected by both prestigious and lesser-well-known journals, and experienced peer review by both, and it's always been very variable in quality. There also seems to be very little correlation between how interesting/ground-breaking/mundane/boring the research is and which journal it gets accepted into, and this mirrors the experience of a lot of my colleagues. The simple fact is that the big journals just get far too many submissions and the research is usually too specialised to guarantee consistently-good peer review, or even consistently good selection of what papers should even be accepted. [1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en&vq=en https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=e...

Osmium 10y ago

> Since there have been several reports of essentially nonexistent peer review from the journal, many people are a bit skeptical. Speaking from personal experience (from our own group and also from a colleague), their peer review is no better or worse than any of the other big-name publishers. And, in regards to the OP's comments, I wouldn't consider where a paper is published to be a particularly good indicator of its quality, provided it's at least a well-known/well-established journal (e.g. in the top-20 on Google's rankings for a given field[1]). I've been accepted and rejected by both prestigious and lesser-well-known journals, and experienced peer review by both, and it's always been very variable in quality. There also seems to be very little correlation between how interesting/ground-breaking/mundane/boring the research is and which journal it gets accepted into, and this mirrors the experience of a lot of my colleagues. The simple fact is that the big journals just get far too many submissions and the research is usually too specialised to guarantee consistently-good peer review, or even consistently good selection of what papers should even be accepted. [1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en&vq=en https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=e...