Note. This original form of this rebuttal was submitted to Science on 3 March 2017 (limited to 300 words as per Science editorial policy) but rejected on 13 March 2017. Herein, we elaborate on our original Science submission in order to more fully address the issue without the length limitations. This rebuttal is followed by the list of the signatories who supported our original submission.

Policy-based privacy protection in open decentralized information systems such as the Web attracted a lot of research effort in the last years. Policies provide a flexible means to define access control conditions, to realize advanced trust-establishment techniques, and to describe and guide the behaviour of systems. The change in the use of the Web and its movement from a static information sy...

In POMDPs, information about the hidden state, delivered through observations, is both valuable to the agent, allowing it to base its actions on better informed internal states, and a "curse", exploding the size and diversity of the internal state space. One attempt to deal with this is to focus on reactive policies, that only base their actions on the most recent observation. However, even rea...

Emergency surgeon: “ last of the mohicans” 2014-2016 editorial policy WSESWJES: position papers, guidelines, courses, books and original research; from WJES impact factor to WSES congress impact factor Fausto Catena, Frederick Moore, Luca Ansaloni, Ari Leppäniemi, Massimo Sartelli, Andrew B Peitzmann, Walt Biffl, Federico Coccolini, Salomone Di Saverio, Belinda De Simone, Michele Pisano and Ern...

In a recent editorial in Biostatistics, Peng (2009) introduced a system for making data and computer code from papers in the journal publicly available so that other researchers can reproduce the statistical analyses in the paper. The editors explain in a short accompanying note (Diggle and Zeger, 2009) that ‘we wish to encourage the practice of making research published in the journal reproduc...

Most fault-tolerant application programs cannot cope with constant changes in their environments and user requirements because they embed policies and mechanisms together so that if the policies or mechanisms are changed the whole programs have to be changed as well. This paper presents a reactive system approach to overcoming this limitation. The reactive system concepts are an attractive para...

Like Archimedes who demanded a place to stand so that he could move the Earth, scientific journals also need a firm point to stand on. We use this example because it stresses the importance of determining the journal’s specific research field by editorial policies. One of the basic strategies for medical journals is to define their scope, which helps them to target specific readership, attract ...