Life as a reject (without review)

By Joern Fischer

This blog has a bit of a history of commenting on “academic life”, rather than just on the content of sustainability research (e.g. here). In line with that history, and following a series of rejected papers, I thought I’d share my latest thoughts on rejections with the rest of the world.

Before I do this, I might just highlight some of the less amusing recent experiences I’ve had with the peer review process – all of these with so-called reputable international journals:

• One paper was rejected without review because it did not fit the scope of a journal – but that same journal had published a paper with virtually the exact same scope in the previous year (same threatened species as a focus, arguably less interesting study area, no more or better data).
• One paper I co-authored was attacked in a response article. We had never been asked…