Letter to the editor: Against the Resilience of Rejected Manuscripts

Against the Resilience of Rejected Manuscripts Sir, In a recent Editorial, Cronin (2012) brought to light the topic on the fate of the rejected manuscripts. Indeed, thousands of papers are rejected and resubmitted to other journals with the hope of getting, eventually, published. Although the peer review was originally conceived to filter 'good science' from 'bad science', its shortcomings have been proved many times, such as: the rejection of major discoveries (Anon, 2003) and highly cited papers (Campanario, 2007), the obliviousness of fraud (Armstrong, 1997) and its slow and expensive ineffectiveness (Weller, 2001). It actually works not as a gate keeper of science but as a moderator of science; usually sending manuscripts of lesser quality to journals of lesser impact as it was well pointed out by Cronin (2012). Considering that a submission usually involves one or two editors who have to select at least two reviewers and acknowledging that finding the latter it usually involves contacting around ten researchers (Perrin, 2008); this means that if a single rejected manuscript is then resubmitted to another journal, it will mobilize between three and five people every time it is sent to a journal, increasing in numbers each time it is sent to another journal. But resubmission does not only mean disturbing many colleagues, but also wasting in many cases their efforts, as reviewers' reports from the first journal are not reused by new reviewers and are in fact, thrown away. Recently, Rohr & Martin (2012) suggested the reuse and recycle of scientific reviews as a way for maximizing reviewers' work and reducing the time lapses between resubmission and editor's answer. The idea behind this would be for editors to request, if previously rejected, other journals' reports on the submitted manuscript. Therefore, editors could check and use these reports in order to decide whether the manuscript is worth reviewing again or not, if the changes made by authors are acceptable or even if the authors' answer to these reports suffices to accept the manuscript or send it to another round of peer review. This proposed system would obviously work against authors as their manuscripts' weaknesses would go unnoticed to the new journals where they'd submit their manuscript. Also, they would be forced to always respond to criticisms. Consequently, some authors would presumably give up their persistence while others would improve their manuscripts. In fact they would carefully consider the journal to which …