Dear Dr. Cruz-Rivera: You may be interested in a discussion of this
issue by by the editors of Ecological Society of America journals.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1890/0012-9623-95.4.342/abstract
Regards, Don Strong
On 5/19/17 9:11 AM, Edwin Cruz-Rivera wrote:
Dear all,
I apologize for the cross listing. We are trying to cover as broad
a canvas as possible:
In the past years, journals have increased the responsibilities of
editors-in-chief to the point that they have become gatekeepers of
their publications. The bottom line is that papers get sent out to
peer reviewers only when editors say so, if they deem the article to
be "of broad enough interest" to their readers.
Clearly, there is a spectacular number of problems with this (though
we do not seem to talk about them). For one, systematic bias can be
introduced in a multitude of ways: what terrestrial researchers
consider "hot topics" of "general interest" may not be the same as
what freshwater or marine ones do. I keep glancing at the
plant-herbivore interactions literature seeing how marine papers often
cites terrestrial works, but not the other way around.
After talking to several colleagues, it seems that the trend is "I
(insert editors name) don't think this is of general interest but it
is really good, so I recommend you submit your manuscript to this
journal of _also general interest_ (open access journal from our
publisher that costs you thousands of dollars to publish in)." This,
frankly, seems like a dishonest practice; if it is good enough for one
general ecology journal it should be for another. Have we exchanged
fashion for quality? We want to know your opinion.
We would like to compile data on the frequency of such cases. Our
hypothesis is that the definition of "general interest" or "worthy of
peer review" in ecology is completely arbitrary and we will be
designing an experiment to test this, but we would like to establish a
baseline by asking for cases in which authors have felt their papers
have been rejected out of bias rather than merit. In order to narrow
the field, it will be important to have articles that were published
in journals after "broader" journals rejected them without peer review.
Your responses will be kept confidential,
Edwin
=================
Dr. Edwin Cruz-Rivera
Associate Professor
Department of Biological Sciences
University of the Virgin Islands
#2 John Brewers Bay
St. Thomas 00802
USVI
Tel: 1-340-693-1235
Fax: 1-340-693-1385
"It is not the same to hear the devil as to see him coming your way"
(Puerto Rican proverb)
--
Donald R. Strong
Editor in Chief,
Ecology
530 752 7886
