Firing incompetent and unprofessional PRL editors?

Evo

Perhaps the fact that you don't toot your own horn as to your credibility leaves members wondering if you are in fact credible. But, had you claimed to be credible, people would then think you weren't. It's a tough situation. You're an unknown, so it's hard to judge.

Perhaps we should assume the OP is a well known and published individual and go from there.

Curious3141

It would be helpful to know the OP's field of research, at least - then we can better judge how politically incendiary it is.

Vanadium 50

Sure there is. The Associate Editors report to Editors. The Editors report to an APS Editor in Chief and there is oversight by an external Editorial Board. The next level of oversight is the American Physical Society's Publications Oversight Committee, and above that is the APS Presidency Line, who are elected by the APS membership.

lisab

What do you mean by political reasons? Is it like, I'm a true-blue and you're a known red, so I'm going to block this paper. Or is it more like, the editor is in the same field as you and your results contradict his/hers...or something else?

Choppy

This is one of those issues where simply posting about it invokes a reaction from readers that there must be a sour grapes element. Your paper got rejected, and now you feel there was a political element to it - okay, but without any evidence surely you can see how something like this would be hard to swallow.

One simple solution is to aim to publish your work in a different journal if you don't feel you're being treated fairly.

Vote with your feet.

If there really is an issue, people will start to notice that good papers are going elsewhere, or that a specific topic isn't getting attention.

rollingstein

The reason members are skeptical is a lack of specificity. Without naming editors why not first tell us your field? Post an abstract? Post the paper itself on arxiv perhaps? Or at least a condensation of your idea in the paper? Experiments or Theory?

"It's political rejection" is just too darn vague.

Assuming he's a crank submitting "Cold Fusion" papers is the other extreme of an assumption. How do we know which one it is?

Evo

Assume best case? My take is that he can't give specifics without exposing his identity, and is just asking if others have encountered any (seemingly) unusual bias. Of course, others would probably be in the same situation, not wanting to give information that might reveal their true identity.

rollingstein

He can't have it both ways. He started off encouraging public naming of editors. Yet he wants to remain anonymous.

Not fair.

G01

I agree with many of the above sentiments, but especially Zapperz's.

The editors of all the major journals are certainly members of the community. In fact, even most journals of a "lower tier" compared to PR and PRL have editors that are active, successful researchers and faculty members. Go to conferences and you will meet some. They know what they are doing and are not incompetent.

As for unprofessional, I can't comment. I'm know from personal experience that editors and reviewers can be nasty at times. Scientists are human and not perfect. However, you have to remember that scientific journals are not a public utility. They have a right to reject a decent paper reporting a decent result if they don't think their reader base will find it interesting. Remember many great writers get stories rejected from the New Yorker every day. This is the nature of trying to publish anything.

If you are having issues getting a paper published even if you are sure the science is sound perhaps you need to work on your 'sell.' Work on tweaking your introduction and making it clear why your work is important and exciting to the journal and it's readers. I've noticed a lot of scientists have problems with this. Many scientists carry around this misconception that a good experiment or good result will sell itself, but this is not necessarily true. Being able to write a good introduction that gets your readers excited and makes the context of your work clear is an important skill to develop in any science.

ZapperZ

I remember one time that our submission to Nature got rejected by the Editor without even getting through to the referees. We received a curt reply from the Nature Editor and the reason why. We disagreed, of course, and we certainly had a recourse to send a rebuttal, but instead, we decided to send it over to PRL. It got accepted within 3 months and as of late last year, became my most highly-cited paper.

For people in this predicament, I would like to point to you an wonderful article written by the late Dan Koshland "Crazy But Correct" (D.E. Koshland, Jr., Nature v.432, p.447 (2004)). If you think YOU have problems with editors and referees, you should read HIS story. And that is why, coming from him, these words mean a lot:

And let's not forget that no less of a person than Einstein himself had issues with journals, and refereeing. And he would have benefited had he paid attention to his referee reports.

Many of us in this field, at one point or another, have faced this rejection. I have dealt with the Physical Review a lot, both as an author and as a referee. In all of my dealings, I have never had the impression of something being done out of a "political" reason. Certainly, having met some of the editors/associate editors, that thought doesn't even enter my mind!

So enter that as one of your statistical sample.

Zz.