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Rejecta Mathematica
There is a new journal:
Rejecta Mathematica is a new, 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.
Isn't that like almost every other journal? Not quite:
Many authors of a rejected paper may simply have disagreed with or chosen to not address the original reviewers' concerns. Rejecta Mathematica also gives those authors the chance to speak out in defense of their own paper.
One very unique aspect of Rejecta Mathematica is that each paper includes an open letter from the authors discussing the paper's original review process, disclosing any known flaws in the paper and stating the case for the paper's value to the community.
Triya offers comment. Maybe they should start a comparable journal for rejected blog posts...
Posted by Tyler Cowen on March 21, 2009 at 09:07 AM in Education | Permalink
Comments
The whole point of journals is to weed out the papers of little merit because nobody has time to read all the crap and to make sure its right. That said it would seem much better to create a youtube/google/wikipedia model where papers are submitted and reviewers rate them and highly cited papers rise to the top.
Posted by: Craig at Mar 21, 2009 9:54:31 AM
There are rejected blog posts?
Not in my experience. I enjoyed it back in the day when blogs actually were online diaries — then we messed 'em up with comments...
(Note how cleverly meta this comment is.) ;-)
Posted by: Garth Wood at Mar 21, 2009 10:03:00 AM
"Maybe they should start a comparable journal for rejected blog posts..."
Not such thing. What are you on about???
Posted by: JF at Mar 21, 2009 11:17:22 AM
This is very cool because I think I can prove that the continuum is denumerable.
Posted by: Lee A. Arnold at Mar 21, 2009 12:39:03 PM
I'm dubious. There are a lot of mathematical crackpots out there-- why won't this just become a huge pile of garbage?
Posted by: MattF at Mar 21, 2009 12:51:23 PM
I can pretty much guarantee you that the continuum IS a huge pile of garbage!
Posted by: Lee A. Arnold at Mar 21, 2009 1:14:57 PM
I believe the Rejecta Mathematica site is a joke. Mathematics has a tendency to give journals Latin names (Inventiones Mathematicae, Compositio Mathematica, etc.), and for decades mathematicians have joked about listing rejected papers as appearing in "Rej. Math." (abbreviated the same way as "Inv. Math."). This web site is the internet version of that joke. It was announced in 2007 and has yet to publish a single paper, so I imagine the site's creators aren't actually serious about running a journal. It's too bad - I don't think it would have led to anything worthwhile, probably just a bunch of crank or low-quality papers, but it would have been fun to see what appeared there.
Posted by: Anonymous at Mar 21, 2009 1:30:21 PM
journal for rejected blog posts? how's your secret blog doing?
Posted by: at Mar 21, 2009 1:32:52 PM
I'm on the side of not really seeing the point of this. Why is it better than an obscure low-prestige journal?
If people care about which journal you published in, then this won't look good. If people use journals as a filter for which papers to look at, then this won't be a useful filter.
If neither of these apply (you don't need the prestige and your readers know your name or read everything on the topic) then how is this better than putting your paper on your website (as in CS) or on the archive (as in physics, arxiv.org)?
The idea of a cover letter explaining why journals won't publish this seems like a gimmick. If you have anything persuasive to say in it, why didn't you say it in your abstract or introduction?
Posted by: improbable at Mar 21, 2009 1:33:06 PM
Thanks Anonymous, agree now it's a joke, guess who didn't read the website before commenting...
Posted by: improbable at Mar 21, 2009 1:48:43 PM
I hear the Obama budget plan is the first to be published there.
Posted by: Yancey Ward at Mar 21, 2009 2:02:03 PM
To improbable:
I think the point (if the journal is legit) is to get those hidden gems that for whatever reason (institutional bias) are not picked up by current journals.
Posted by: gc at Mar 21, 2009 2:34:38 PM
There should be at least a website where you could send papers and rejection letters. Especially from reviewers who rejected the paper recommending you to do precisely what you have in Section 3. That would be awesome.
No, I am not bitter.
Posted by: Bushequalhitler at Mar 21, 2009 4:51:14 PM
Assuming it is not a joke:
A scientist may not want to go to the hassle of submitting an article rejected by a high-prestige journal to a low-prestige one. They may think there are genuine problems with their article - which any journal would pick up - but which it isn't worth their time to fix.
As for rejected blog posts - I thought blog posts were rejected articles, or at least, rejected ideas for articles which are not worth the time to fully develop. So why not just post the rejected article on one's blog?
Posted by: Timothy at Mar 21, 2009 5:29:25 PM
My first hunch was that it's a joke. My second hunch was that if it's not a joke it's an attempt to expose the bankruptcy of the review session. My third hunch is if that's what it is, the review process will come out looking pretty good in the end...
Posted by: ogmb at Mar 21, 2009 6:23:39 PM
There needs to be Schizophrenica, the journal for crazy person rants.
Time Cube guy can be editor-in-chief.
Posted by: Jason Malloy at Mar 21, 2009 8:38:37 PM
I can just imagine its equivalent journal, Rejecta Historica (aka Rej. Hist.). Lots and lots of articles about Civil War Battles and the origins of the pyramids. Unfortunately, also a lot of articles trying to talk their way out of the Holocaust.
Posted by: PQuincy at Mar 22, 2009 11:39:57 AM
PQuincy, that reminds me of a long ago April Fools edition of my college newspaper. We had just gone through the college-journalistic ritual of arguing about whether or not we had to publish some Holocaust-denying "advertisement" in the interests of free speech. (My vote was of course not.) One guy wrote a fantastic mock account of how the South really won the Civil War but it had all been covered up by evil historians. It was brilliant, but alas, no online archive...
Posted by: jt at Mar 22, 2009 8:15:30 PM
I believe that it has ceased to exist, but for quite some time there
was actually a journal called The Journal of Irreproducible Results.
It was mostly a joke, but not entirely. It was also subscribed to
by some pretty major university libraries.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Mar 23, 2009 1:51:31 AM
I just googled it, and apparently it still exists, having started in 1955.
It is labeled as a "science humor magazine," so it would not be equivalent
at all to this Rejecta Mathematica, whatever it is. Apparently the Journal
of Irreproducible Results has been somewhat erratically published since
2004. It current editor is an astronomer, Norman Sperling.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Mar 23, 2009 1:58:45 AM
If this were done in physics, it would be called The Refuse of Modern Physics.
Posted by: Joseph Hertzlinger at Mar 24, 2009 12:46:07 PM
The first issue is out:
http://math.rejecta.org/vol1-num1
Cheers,
Igor.
Posted by: Igor Carron at Jul 15, 2009 8:28:30 AM
