“Because your manuscript was not given a high priority rating during our initial assessment, we have decided not to send your paper for further review. Science Advances aims to publish significant, innovative, original research that advances the frontiers of science and extends the high standards of excellence established by the Science family of journals. We receive many very interesting submissions, more than we can possibly send out for in-depth review or publish. Our decision regarding your manuscript is therefore not necessarily a reflection of the quality of your work, but rather of our constraints and goals in publishing high impact results across a broad and balanced array of disciplines.”

In this case, while we do not question the validity of your work, I am afraid we are not persuaded that these findings represent a sufficiently striking advance to justify publication in Nature Communications. Although we cannot offer to publish your manuscript, I recommend you transfer it to Scientific Reports…

As you may know, in deciding which papers to publish we have to make an editorial judgement about the immediacy of interest to our readers and the degree and nature of the advance demonstrated. In practice, this means that we decline a majority (and ever increasing proportion) of manuscripts without sending them to referees, in cases where we feel that, even if referees were to certify the manuscript as technically correct, there would not be a sufficiently strong case for publication in Nature Physics. I am sorry to have to say that we must take this view concerning your submission.   In the present case, we have no doubt that your mathematical description of the dynamics of human walking will be of inherent interest to fellow researchers working on this and related topics. However, I regret that we are unable to conclude that your paper provides the sort of new fundamental or general insight in physics, with sufficiently broad implications, that would excite the interest of a wide, non-specialist audience of physicists. Therefore, we feel that the paper would find a more appropriate home in a specialist journal.   Although I regret that we cannot offer to publish your paper in Nature Physics for editorial reasons, it may be appropriate for our sister journal Nature Communications, and we encourage you to transfer it there. If you would like to do this (or transfer to a different Nature Portfolio journal), a link to initiate the process can be found in the…