“Overview of Addressed Fiber Bragg Structures’ Development” is accepted in Photonics at Special Issue Editorial Board Members’ Collection Series: Photonics Sensors

 I am pleased that our long-suffering article has finally been accepted for publication.

The difficulties with it began when we first sent it to the journal MDPI Sensors in a special Issue of Fiber Grating Sensors: Design, Fabrication, and Application. The manuscript was relevant because it was devoted to the review of our developments concerning addressable and multicast fiber Bragg structures with the microwave photonics principle of interrogation. The beauty of our proposed approach is that it does not require expensive spectrum analyzers. The Bragg structure itself is both a shaper of microwave photonics radiation and simultaneously a sensor; in addition, it has its own unique address, which allows us to separate the signal from each sensor separately. 

So, at that time, three reviews have been received. Two were positive (accept the manuscript in the present form), and one was negative. And the comments were of such a general nature that they cannot be applied to the review article at all. For example, the reviewer commented that the article “has nothing new in terms of science” or “the authors have not added anything in terms of science compared with what they have published before”. And rightly so, the article is a review article, which tells about the anthology of addressable Bragg structures. Or here's another observation with which the reviewer began: “First of all, while it is fine to report on progress in the development of such methods, I believe authors should refrain from assertions that fiber Bragg grating technology has been "adopted" in many areas, which confuses experimental projects with actual commercial products”. Well, or the claim was, this review article contains a lot of information about already published results. Well, how did he want it in the review article? Can it be taken seriously? I'm sure you can't. 

We, of course, responded in detail to all the comments of this reviewer, and there were quite a few of them. And the final verdict of the reviewer was: This revised version has fairly insignificant changes that do not address, in my opinions, the shortcomings that I discussed in my initial review. The paper remains full of already published mathematical analysis of the technique that address very little of the practical difficulties. There is still no description of how to make the linear slope filter that was presumably used in previously published experimental work, or the experimental spectra of the AFBS used in those demonstrations. Considering these shortcomings, my initial recommendation to reject the paper remains unchanged.

Well, the paper was no accepted. Either the editor of the issue was friends with this reviewer, or the editor himself reviewed, or we with our addressable microwave photonics measurements have stepped on someone's tail. 

Unfortunately, a preprint of this manuscript was made at the same time, and it was not possible to submit it to another serious journal. For example, the Karbala International Journal of Modern Science (Q1) rejects manuscripts that have already been highlighted in the preprint. There was hope for other MDPI journals, which own this preprint platform. 

But finally, common sense prevailed and our manuscript “Overview of Addressed Fiber Bragg Structures' Development” was accepted by the MDPI Photonics.

Special Issue Editorial Board Members' Collection Series: Photonics Sensors. Thank you, guys, for a good job.