The Paper Rejection Repository

We recently came across The Paper Rejection Repository on the website of Niko Grigorieff’s group at Brandeis University. On this page, he showed from which journals some published papers had previously been rejected, and includes the rejection letters. We invited Niko to share some more details about this project in this guest post:

My lab works in the area of structural biology and electron cryo-microscopy (cryo-EM). Cryo-EM is still developing as a high-resolution imaging technique, and much of what we do in the lab focuses on the development of new methods. To serve the community, we maintain a web page that distributes software developed in my lab, hosts forums where users can ask questions and get answers, lists publications and makes published cryo-EM datasets available for download to help other developers.

Three years ago I decided to start an experiment on our web page: a repository for letters and review of manuscripts that were rejected by a journal and later published in a different journal. The idea was inspired by lunchtime discussions to determine how our rejection record compares with others. These discussions would often follow a rejection of a manuscript and, in some cases, frustration with the peer review process that went along with it. In some cases, decisions by editors appear arbitrary, reviewers’ judgments appear biased, politically motivated or even disrespectful. Certain journals also try to assess the level of excitement and reject a manuscript even if reviews are positive.

While most researchers will have similar experiences with the review process, very little information is actually publically accessible. Some journals have begun publishing the review letters together with an accepted manuscript. However, talking to my colleagues at Brandeis and elsewhere, some manuscripts take over a year to get published and when they are finally accepted, the story of their odyssey is mostly lost. After all, who cares about the past when there is a happy end? As it turned out in my web page experiment, many people care. In the last three years, our web page registered about 23,000 downloads (about 20 per day), of which 6,600 were rejection letters (about 6 per day). This compares to only 1,300 downloads (about one per day) of our main software package.

I did not anticipate the popularity of the rejection repository but must assume that other researchers either enjoy reading about the misfortune of their colleagues, or they like to share my experience with the peer review process. It is perhaps interesting to note that while the repository is open for everybody to post rejection letters, almost all the posts are from my own lab. It takes time to post, and when a manuscript has been accepted it is time to move on. Still, I like to believe that some people would appreciate a higher degree of transparency and accountability in the review process, and that reading rejection letters is a way of putting their own experience into perspective.

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