The "revise and resubmit as new" option in peer-review

by Martin Monperrus

Recently, as author and reviewer, some academic journals have introduced a new kind of decision “Revise and resubmit as new”.

Definition

There is no official definition of the meaning of “Revise and resubmit as new”. I asked some journals in my field and received the following answers:

Answer #1 (IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering)

[With “Revise and resubmit as new”] your paper will be treated as a brand new paper and no history of its previous review will carry forward. Our new policy is to give authors the option of requesting “reviewer continuity” in handling their resubmitted manuscript. With reviewer continuity the same associate editor will handle your manuscript, if possible, and they will reuse the previous reviewers if they are available at the time that the manuscript is submitted. If you would like “reviewer continuity” we ask that you provide a detailed summary of a changes that addresses all changes made to your manuscript in response to reviewer feedback.

Answer #2 (IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing)

Major revision indicates the manuscript definitely needs some work and will require additional review, but the manuscript is in decent shape, the research is sound, etc. Revise and resubmit is just a step below reject. The paper needs a significant overhaul, but may have merit in the journal if the author can address these issues. When papers need a major revision, they will keep the same Manuscript ID. When they are revised and resubmitted as new, they will get a new Manuscript ID.

To sum up, “Revise and resubmit as new” can be considered as a “Serious Major Revision”.

Authors should consider this decision as major revision, and resubmit with asking for reviewer continuity and attaching an author response.

Utility

AFAIU, “Revise and resubmit as new” is mostly for changing statistics (such as the average end-to-end time). It has an administrative impact (new ID) and a scientific impact (by default, you loose reviewer continuity). There is no scientific value.

My $2c is that “Revise and resubmit as new” is confusing and almost useless, the classical Reject / Major Revision / Minor Revision seems to perfectly do the job, esp. if one can reject after Major or Minor.

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