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Academic publishing is broken – unexpectedreview.net wants to fix it

• filipponeri 5y ago
  did you ever received a review that you deemed unfair, unjustified, or inexplicable from some peer reviewed academic journal? Did that make you question the way peer reviewing is conducted? Unexpected Review is a community for researchers who want to publicly discuss unfair reviews that they have received asking feedback to colleagues. Consider using the service and spreading the news among your friends working in research and come and visit https://www.unexpectedreview.net https://www.unexpectedreview.net
  • jjgreen 5y ago
    Why yes I did, so I did some more work on it and submitted it elsewhere. Sometimes it was accepted, sometimes it wasn't, in the latter case maybe the original review was justified. What I didn't do was kvetch about it on a public forum.
• filipponeri 5y ago
  I thank jjgreen for her/his invaluable comment: > "What I didn't do was kvetch about it on a public forum." Academics are supposed to stay silent about the diffuse unfair peer reviewing, or else...
  • jjgreen 5y ago
    That was an ill-mannered comment of mine, I apologise. Writing an academic paper is hard, it takes months of work, you send it off and it gets rejected, that crushes the soul. I've had that happen to me plenty of times. Is it fair? it does not matter, you can complain all you like about it, it will not make any difference, no-one in the history of the world has ever had a paper accepted after complaining that it's not fair. Sorry, that just the way it is. Put the paper and review in a drawer, leave it for 3 months, then look at them again when you're not so cross. Read the reviews, see if you can find anything in them which might be justified (particularly if multiple reviewers say the same thing), address those, then send it off to different journal. Do that 2-3 times, then give it up, move onto something else.