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“The system of scientific publishing is wrong. First of all its big business for the publishers, getting free material usually paid by government grants and selling it in form of a journal at a high price.”
This comment by Terence Hale, was made in response to an article titled Huddled Maths at Economist.com about a new journal Rejecta Mathematica.
The mission statement for Rejecta Mathematica states
Rejecta Mathematica is an open access, online journal that publishes only papers that have been rejected from peer-reviewed journals (or conferences with comparable review standards) in the mathematical sciences.
At Rejecta Mathematica we believe that many previously rejected papers (even those rejected for legitimate reasons) can nonetheless have a very real value to the academic community. This value may take many forms:
- “mapping the blind alleys of science”: papers containing negative results can warn others against futile directions;
- “reinventing the wheel”: papers accidentally rederiving a known result may contain new insight or ideas;
- “squaring the circle”: papers discovered to contain a serious technical flaw may nevertheless contain information or ideas of interest;
- “applications of cold fusion”: papers based on a controversial premise may contain ideas applicable in more traditional settings;
- “misunderstood genius”: other papers may simply have no natural home among existing journals.
Famous papers that have had difficulty getting published include
PAUL LAUTERBUR, paper on magnetic-resonance imaging was rejected when first submitted to Nature. Lauterbur later won a Nobel prize for his work
Peter Higgs, who predicted the existence of physics’s missing boson, had is paper rejected by Physics Letters, who claimed it was of no obvious relevance to physics. The paper was later published in Physical Review Letters.
Paul Krugman’s paper on trade with increasing returns to scale, which won Krugman the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2008 was rejected by the referees of the Journal of International Economics. Fortunately, the editor, Jagdish Baghwati overruled them.
