Q: Should I inform the editorial office about the reason for the withdrawal even if it is before the peer review stage?

The journal's actions are unusual, and I can understand if you are annoyed and even frustrated. Your decision to consider withdrawing the manuscript in such a scenario is entirely understandable.

However, before proceeding, I would suggest you give the journal “the benefit of the doubt” just once, in case you haven’t done so already. This is for several reasons. With another journal, you will have to start the submission process all over again. With this journal, you have already initiated the process, and perhaps, due to the revisions so far, the manuscript is already improved a bit. Also, you haven’t mentioned whether these revisions have been for the content or for the style and formatting. If the latter, perhaps you weren’t entirely aware of the journal’s guidelines and therefore didn’t follow them. If the latter, that should ideally come at the peer review stage, in which case, the journal’s requests for pre-review revisions is indeed odd.

What you could do, in case you haven’t already, is to write them a mail asking for more information around this requirement of pre-review revisions. Based on their response, you may decide how to proceed. If their response is generic, such as “This is a part of our process,” you may then decide to submit elsewhere. If their response is specific, such as “You needed to follow A and B formatting guidelines…” or “You needed to include X and Y details in the Methods section,” you may realize that they are perhaps doing this for the benefit of your manuscript. In the same mail, you may also ask them if making these pre-review revisions is likely to increase the chance of acceptance, and if not, whether you can withdraw the manuscript from them. So, basically, in the same mail, you can bring up and seek clarification on these various points.

So, yes, to answer your question, even if the manuscript has not reached the peer review stage, you would need to inform them in case of a withdrawal and provide a reason for it. Especially in this scenario, the journal has spent some time and effort on the manuscript; plus, the manuscript is active in their system. If you withdraw, they will proceed to archive it and need to spend no more time and effort on it. This would also be per the protocol. To submit to another journal, it is necessary to provide the mails around the withdrawal as reference or even proof. Finally, it’s also the right or nice thing to do. While they may have possibly been unnecessarily hard with you so far, you can prefer to be gracious in return. :-)

In case you decide to withdraw and submit elsewhere, to reduce a similar situation from occurring with another journal, it would help to share this information with them in the cover letter, or better still, through a presubmission inquiry.

Finally, and this is something from our side. In case your manuscript is in English, you may consider submitting it on our new AI-powered platform, R Pubsure, which aims to help you minimize desk rejection. It does this in two ways. One, it initially performs a machine-based check to help you improve your manuscript. (As you have already done several pre-review revisions on your paper, it may score high in this check, but it will still go through this check.) Then, when your paper is submission-ready, it allows you to showcase your improved paper to several editors on the platform, one of whom may consider it for publishing with their journal. You may find out more about the platform here: R Pubsure

All the best for all the next steps!

You may also find the following related queries useful:

• Should I withdraw my paper if the journal is taking unusually long to process?
• How can I withdraw my paper without offending the journal editor?
• What can I do if the editor does not confirm my withdrawal request?