Juan Carlos Lopez is the editor of the journal Nature Medicine, which means it’s his job to organize peer-reviewers and, ultimately, accept or reject a scientific publication.
Sometimes, scientists get pissy when their papers are rejected. No surprise there. But I was surprised to read, on the Nature Medicine blog, one of the nasty emails that Dr. Lopez received from one such scientist earlier this month:
—–Original Message—–
From:
Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2008 7:26 AM
To: Medicine
Subject: Re: Decision
Dear Dr. Lopez,
thank you for the fast decision. I agree, we will find another journal for publishing our results.
After all, neither Temin´s reverse transcriptase nor the first PCR description of Mullis found acceptance by a nature journal.
I wish you more luck for your future decisions.
Kind regards
Umm, seriously? I guess this smug punk never ever wants to get accepted by a Nature journal. As I writer whose pitches are often rejected, I can say with certainty that a nasty response will not ingratiate you to the all-powerful editor the next time around.
I’m putting my next question to DrugMonkey et al.: Was this guy on crack? Is this kind of knee-jerk response a common thing among freshly rejected scientists?
4 comments
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February 3, 2009 at 10:38 am
DrugMonkey
HAHAHAHA, what a disgruntled wee-bag. I’m sure that editors will tell you this is common enough but it is by no means accepted or acceptable practice.
You occasionally get this sort of thing in grant review, people talking in the Intro to the revised application about what idiots the prior reviewers were…it doesn’t go over well
February 3, 2009 at 10:53 am
Abel Pharmboy
mmmmm…bad move there, chief. If not crack, then meth.
Reminds me of an actually funny letter somewhere on Teh Intertubez where someone responded to an employer rejection with a letter stating that they could not accept the rejection as they have a pool of perfectly well-qualified rejections from which to choose. Gotta find that one…
February 3, 2009 at 11:08 am
Comrade PhysioProf
Two points:
(1) This is stupid and immature, and not very common in my experience. I certainly have never responded like that to any of the many rejections I have ever received.
(2) Editors probably see this kind of shit on occasion, and I seriously doubt that they care one way or the other. If they received another manuscript from this corresponding author, they would likely consider it just like any other, assessing it on the usual basis of self-interest of the journal.
February 7, 2009 at 10:36 am
mz
it would be interestign to know if the manuscript actually went through to peer-review or if it was triaged by the editor and his/her staff. in the latter case, i do have some sympathy for the author’s sentiments.