Hi @NateWr ,
Hope you had relaxing holidays!
Thank you for your comments. I see some possible incompatibilities between point 1 (resulting in less (mis)information for authors) and point 3 (resulting in more information for authors). To be honest, I do not think that it makes much sense (for us) to provide authors with more automatically generated status information (as is given in your mockup). I fear that this will result in even more emails to editors, asking for clarification etc. and add even more work on them. Review processes are very diverse, e.g., for some subjects it is much more difficult to find reviewers as for others, there are unforeseen delays etc. I would prefer to give authors a general description of the review process (which can be done already on the public journal website) and same broad time ranges or mean turn-around times. That’s it. Every author is free to contact editors individually if they have status requests. So I am not convinced that even more automatically generated status messages for authors are needed (point 3). I think we would actually prefer to disable such a feature.
Best wishes
Armin