IEEE Access Response to Reviewers: How to Write a Rebuttal That Wins (2026)

IEEE Access is a fast-turnaround open-access megajournal, and its reviewer culture is unusual in three ways that change how you write a rebuttal.

First, the decision model is binary. Reviewers do not recommend a traditional major revision; they recommend Accept (minor edits permitted) or one of two Reject states. The Associate Editor then either accepts, rejects with "updates required before resubmission," or rejects with "resubmission not permitted."

There is no second-round revise to fall back on.

Second, IEEE Access reviewers judge on technical soundness rather than novelty, and the Associate Editors evaluate whether the study is well-designed and the data sufficient to support the conclusion.

The journal states that articles are not necessarily expected to have a high level of novelty, but they should be distinct from previous publications and technically sound. Reviewers ask whether the study is well-designed, whether the data are sufficient to support the conclusion, and whether the references are appropriate.

So a rebuttal that argues "our contribution is novel" answers a question IEEE Access reviewers are not asking. The winning rebuttal demonstrates that the methodology is correct, the results reproducible, and the baselines fair.

Third, the resubmission is one-time and terminal. IEEE Access allows authors to revise and resubmit only once, and if all concerns and criticisms have not been properly addressed, the article is rejected without the opportunity to revise and resubmit.

The reproducibility expectation is also explicit for computational work: reviewers look for full implementation details, hyperparameters, dataset splits, and the means for another engineer to rebuild the result.

That combination, binary plus soundness-first plus one shot, means your single response to reviewers has to be more complete and more reproducibility-focused than a rebuttal at a slower society journal.

The standard IEEE Access rebuttal opens with a short paragraph to the Associate Editor summarizing the major changes and confirming that a full point-by-point document follows.

Then comes a Reviewer 1 / Reviewer 2 structure where each reviewer comment is quoted in full, followed by your response and the specific manuscript revision with page and line numbers.

Because the resubmission is treated as a fresh submission, attach the point-to-point document as a separate file and make sure every comment from both reviewers is answered. The named failure pattern: authors who answer the friendly reviewer thoroughly and the skeptical reviewer thinly lose the paper, because the skeptical reviewer is usually the one the Associate Editor weights on a soundness call.

The single most-cited rebuttal mistake is the unlocatable change. For every reviewer comment, your response must reference the exact page and line where the revision appears in the revised manuscript. Write "page 7, lines 21-44," not "we have updated the manuscript."

Reviewers re-checking a one-time resubmission will not hunt for your edit. If they cannot find it, they treat the comment as unaddressed, and an unaddressed comment is what triggers the terminal "resubmission not permitted" outcome.

Use the page and line numbers of the revised file, and keep them current after any reformatting so they still point to the right text.

Make reviewer text and your response visually distinguishable so the Associate Editor can scan the thread. Put each reviewer comment in a different color or in italic, or bold the word "Response:" before your reply.

A common, clean convention is reviewer comments in black italic and author responses in plain blue, with the revised manuscript text quoted in an indented box. The point is that a reader should never have to guess where the reviewer's voice ends and yours begins.

When reviewer and author text run together in one undifferentiated block, the Associate Editor cannot quickly confirm that every comment was answered, and ambiguity works against you on a single-shot resubmission.

This is the honest-friction part, and at IEEE Access the stakes are higher than at multi-round journals. Because the resubmission is one-time and terminal, a rebuttal that fights the wrong battle does not just extend the timeline; it can end in rejection with no further resubmission.

IEEE Access states plainly that if all concerns and criticisms have not been properly addressed, the article will be rejected without the opportunity to revise and resubmit. There is no second resubmission to recover in.

The majority of disputes are not worth contesting. If a reviewer asks for an ablation, an additional baseline, or clearer reproducibility detail, comply; these are exactly the technical-soundness and reproducibility checks IEEE Access reviewers are instructed to apply.

Push back only when a request would reduce technical correctness or falls outside the binary soundness criteria. Even then, make a clarifying edit and propose an alternative rather than refusing flat.

When a reviewer's core objection is genuinely a soundness failure you cannot fix within one resubmission, the realistic move is not to argue. Withdraw, fix the science properly, and submit fresh, because at IEEE Access a fresh submission is the only path after a terminal reject.

Treat the single resubmission as a scarce resource: spend it answering every comment in full, not on winning an argument about novelty that IEEE Access reviewers were never grading.

In our pre-submission review work with IEEE Access submissions and rebuttals, three patterns generate the most consistent terminal rejections on the one-time resubmission. Each is testable against your own response before you spend that single shot.

Weak or stale baselines surviving into the rebuttal. The most common reason an IEEE Access resubmission fails is that the response argues the contribution rather than fixing the baselines.

IEEE Access reviewers grade technical soundness, so when the abstract claims improved detection, prediction, classification, or efficiency but the comparison table includes only old methods or a single dataset, a reviewer reads the gap as the paper not meeting the soundness bar.

In our pre-submission reviews of IEEE Access manuscripts, rebuttals that add a fair, recent baseline comparison and re-run all experiments under identical conditions clear re-review; rebuttals that defend the original baselines do not. The fix is mechanical: add the requested benchmarks, report them in a new table, and cite the table by page and line.

Reproducibility gaps left unanswered. IEEE Access reviewers explicitly look for whether another engineer could rebuild the result, which makes reproducibility and code or implementation detail the second failure pattern.

Across our IEEE Access pre-submission reviews, the rebuttals that fail here respond to a reproducibility comment with prose ("the method is standard") instead of artifacts.

The pattern that clears is concrete: add full pseudocode or an algorithm block, list hyperparameters, dataset splits, and hardware in the revised methods, and point the reviewer to the exact location. A reproducibility comment answered with new detail in the manuscript is satisfied; a reproducibility comment answered with reassurance is not.

Selective answering across two reviewers. The third pattern is structural rather than scientific: authors answer the friendly reviewer in depth and the skeptical reviewer thinly. Because IEEE Access uses a minimum of two independent reviewers and the Associate Editor reads both threads, an under-answered second reviewer is a common cause of the "concerns not properly addressed" reject.

In our IEEE Access pre-submission reviews, we flag any rebuttal where one reviewer's comments receive substantially shorter responses, where a requested ablation or statistical significance check is acknowledged but not actually added, or where a figure the reviewer questioned is defended without revision.

The fix is to answer every comment from both reviewers with an action verb and a page and line reference, and to make the harder reviewer's requested change visible in the manuscript, not just in the letter.

These three patterns are why an IEEE Access rebuttal is not interchangeable with a Nature or Cell rebuttal. The soundness-first, binary, one-shot structure rewards completeness and reproducibility evidence over argument, and it punishes selective or defensive responses more severely than a multi-round journal would. A response that adds real baselines, real reproducibility detail, and full coverage of both reviewers is the one that survives IEEE Access re-review.

• Every comment from both reviewers is answered with an action verb and a page and line reference to the revised manuscript.
• Technical-soundness and reproducibility requests (baselines, ablations, pseudocode, hyperparameters, dataset splits) are addressed with new manuscript content, not prose reassurance.
• The harder reviewer's comments receive responses at least as thorough as the friendlier reviewer's.
• The tone is firm only on soundness, never defensive on cosmetic points, and all cited DOIs in the revised reference list are clean.