People often ask me what the best part of editing a journal like Nature Medicine is. Well, let me tell you instead about the worst part — handling manuscript appeals.
It will come as no surprise to you that we turn down a lot of submissions to the journal; somewhere around 90% or more of the papers we receive go back to their authors — some after our internal review and some others after peer review. Unfortunately, people don’t always agree with our decision and ask us to reconsider it.
I say this is unfortunate on several counts. First, as we cannot give priority to a paper we already evaluated, sometimes people have to wait as long as two months to get a new “no” if their arguments don’t persuade us to change our decision.
Second, many appeals arrive immediately after we sent our decision. So, they often come from a very angry author who has not had time to see if our reasons to reject the paper actually make sense and who, to put it simply, just wants to vent. Reading an e-mail from or talking over the phone to someone like that is not a pleasant experience.
Third, we take appeal quite seriously, which means that we need to go back to reading the whole paper and the comments from the referees. Sometimes we even get the referees involved once again to clarify some of their points or to comment on the criticisms from the other reviewers. All of this takes time: editorial time, reviewers’ time and author’s time. In our experience, this is rarely time well spent, as it often simply duplicates what we already did once.
I think that authors often overlook two things about the way we think about appeals. For starters, we view appeals on manuscripts the same way as judges see appeals in a court of law — they are successful when there is clear evidence that the original sentence was a miscarriage of justice. So, if an author provides evidence that the reviewers’ and/or our own arguments to reject the paper are fundamentally flawed, then we reverse our decision. But if the original decision was difficult, and one could provide sound arguments for rejecting or not rejecting the paper, then the appeal is not likely to prosper, the same way that a judge wouldn’t reverse a decision if it could have gone either way on the basis of the evidence at the courtroom.
The second aspect that authors often ignore is the fact that, in addition to our responsibility to you as the author, we also have to keep our readers in mind. So, when deciding on whether to reject or not a paper, we also need to take into account whether the manuscript is something that our readers would expect to see in Nature Medicine. And the fact is that, very often, people’s view of the appeal of their own work is very different from what we think our readers should get for their money.
In a way, our job is not too dissimilar from that of editors of, say, The Economist or The New Yorker, whose desks are flooded by submissions and pitches, and must ultimately decide on what would be of interest to their subscribers. In our case, of course, after we made that decision, we then lean on our reviewers to comment on technical and other aspects of the work. But this difference notwithstanding, our sense of ownership of the journal is a very important part of our decision-making process.
Going back to the original question that prompted this blog entry, this sense of ownership of the journal is one of the best parts of being an editor.
