How to deal with this type of rejection without review report? After being in "Under Review" status for 4.5 months (before that it stayed in "Reviewing" status for 3 weeks), I get the following cold rejection without any review report or review comments. How to deal with this cold rejection? If it had come much early, without going into "Under Review", I would have saved time (valuable for an independent researcher. I am not disheartened by rejection but the lack of review report or comments.


  Dear Professor XXXXX,
  
  This message concerns the manuscript
  
  XXXXX A XXXXX(XX) XXXXX XX XXXXX    by XXXXX XXXXX
  
  submitted to the Journal of XXXXX &amp; XXXXX.
  
  We regret that we cannot consider it, in part because at present we
  have a large backlog of excellent articles awaiting publication. We
  are thus forced to return articles that might otherwise be considered.
  
  Thank you for considering the Journal of XXXXX &amp; XXXXX.
  
  Sincerely,
  
  XXXXX XXX     University of XXXXX, XXXXX Editor - XXXXX &amp; XXXXX
Educated guess of what happened: they invited reviewers (which automatically updates the status even if the reviewers don't agree to review). Some/many of the reviewers then declined to review, giving reasons that made the editor decide to desk reject your paper.

I'm not a mathematician, but from what I've heard, 4.5 months is not a particularly long wait for mathematics papers. If so, it's not really fair to say the journal treated your manuscript in a subpar manner.

There's nothing you can do about this except submit to a lower-tier journal.