Editorial: the revise & resubmit (R&R) process

In our last editorial (2018, v. 2) we addressed the desk review (DR) process, the first challenge for a prospective article along the evaluation process for publication. As we pointed out, if the manuscript is not rejected during the DR phase, we can assume that the article has a good potential to be included in the journal. As the great majority of DR decisions are for rejection (in a good journal, this can reach 85 or 90 per cent of the submissions), passing on to the double-blind review process is good news, indeed. If your manuscript has not been rejected by DR (congratulations, by the way!), you should wait for the first round of revisions. You are going to face what is called the revise and resubmit (R&R) process, i.e. “revising a paper and preparing a response document for the action editor and the reviewers who have invited these actions” (Ireland, 2008, p. 1049). R&R is a regular part of the publication process, together with “in process”, “in review”, “accepted with revisions” and “in press” (Rocco, 2011). It presents itself in many ways and should be faced as an ordinary part of the researcher’s life. It can either end in the article’s publication or not; it can either be quick or it can take several rounds of revisions. There is no guarantee of success, after all. At the 2017 Academy of Management Conference, Foss (2017) of Bocconi University addressed the R&R process in one of the sessions. We try to summarise his presentation here. According to his view, this process has seven steps