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
The problems with “revise and resubmit as new” are the following:
It’s unknown and unclear: PhD students and newcomers in this publication process don’t really understand what it means. My new students always ask me about it and this web page about it receives some real traffic.
It’s a mixed signal for authors, it’s not a reject, it’s not a major revision. It’s vaguely in between. “revise and resubmit as new” tends to reflect a lack of engagement from reviewers and editors, who neither stand for rejection nor for endorsing the core work with a major revision.
It often breaks editor continuity and reviewer continuity. We all know that reviewers would often have different views and different requirements, and when a paper has “revise and resubmit as new” without reviewer continuity, it means that the authors have to comply with 6 sets of requirements, pushing the paper in 6 different directions. This often dilutes the core contribution and take aways, with some loosely related experiments and too large discussions, weakening overall quality.
Breaking reviewer continuity also adds additional review load on the community as a whole because it doubles the number of required reviewers for the same paper.
AFAIU from private commuication, “Revise and resubmit as new” has been introduced 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 real scientific value.
The traditional process with “Reject”, “Major”, “Minor”, “Accept” has passed the test of time for many decades, Science and its most established disciplines have been running with it very well.
For all these reasons, I recommend for reviewers and editors to not use it.