As I scanned through the bad news, I noticed with interest that my reaction was strangely muted. Of course I liked the paper and wanted it to get published, and was disappointed when “on this occasion”, the editors “regretted” to inform us that they were “unable to offer publication” \u2013 how well I know the standard euphemisms all editors learn to cut and paste from handy templates their very first week on the job. But the fact that I’m not the first author seemed to impart a detached, almost anaesthetic vibe to the whole dreary proceedings. When you’re the lead author, a rejection feels like a kick in the stomach every single time, no matter how many years have passed since your first. When you’re not, the overriding reaction is more a fatalistic sense of impending tedium. <\/p>\n
\nIt all started last year. The original manuscript, authored by a few of my colleagues, had been close to getting into a respectable, general-interest biology journal of impact factor circa 10, but a few key experiments were lacking and the referees, although largely positive, had failed to persuade the editor that any future efforts were worth waiting for. Meanwhile, the first author had moved on and I was drafted in to fill in a few missing pieces experimentally. As my efforts proved useful, I got bumped up from middle to second author and, sort of by default, ended up taking control of the car halfway through its rather bumpy road trip, even though I was still only riding shotgun.<\/p>\n
\nSubmitting papers, as many of you know only too well, takes a hell of a lot of time. The text, for me, is the relatively easy part. But your average multi-panel figure can take days to assemble and get just right. The files come off the confocal microscope in inscrutable formats that only ImageJ can read; the TIFFs must be created there in its serviceable but clumsy little universe, their channels separated or merged, then imported into Photoshop for tweaking and cropping before being placed into Illustrator and properly scaled and labelled for the final mock-up. <\/p>\n
\nIt’s not hard, but it eats up an amazing amount of time. So when the boss casually remarks, “I think maybe we should add that other control panel to this figure, and can you show the RGB merges as well \u2013 oh, and [yelling at your back as you try to escape down the corridor] maybe make a blow-up of all the relevant areas and put them alongside, with a few arrows?” \u2013 your heart sinks. Especially as, when you’re riding shotgun, it’s not always obvious where the departed first author has actually stashed the original files, let alone what he’s called them. So appended to the usual conveyor belt of image processing is a flurry of emails with someone whose mental hard-drive is slowly being overwritten by newer and more exciting things.<\/p>\n
\nThe rejection letter I was reading was from the first attempt at resubmission. After overhauling the figures and text, we’d gone for this particular journal for its audience, even though its impact factor was significantly lower (about 7). But despite nearly squeaking in at the previous and more significant journal, the current one hadn’t even sent it out for review. Why? Because we didn’t have the “mechanism”. (As the first author so eloquently put it by email, if we’d had the mechanism, we would hardly be submitting the paper to them<\/em>, would we?) <\/p>\n \nSo what to do next? The paper is nice, self-contained; the referees of the first journal thought it important, innovative and of interest to a broad readership, and it deserves to be in a decent journal. Yet all of us were reluctant to spend much more time on this \u2013 especially me, with my ticking time bomb of an expiring fellowship. I certainly couldn’t take the experiments to the next level without abandoning my own projects altogether, and to be frank I wasn’t keen on spending even a few more days preparing the manuscript for a major rewrite.<\/p>\n \nIn the end, the decision was ludicrous, and was based entirely on formatting. I drew up a list of half a dozen suitable journals of about the same impact factor and made a table with three columns: word limit, figure limit, and structure (whether the Results and Discussion should be merged or separate, or whether it didn’t matter), and we just chose the journal that was most flexible \u2013 in other words, where we wouldn’t have to make cosmetic changes like cutting or rearranging words, or relegating figures to Supplementary (which would have involved having to change text on the figures, or rearranging some of the panels). Fortunately it was the journal I was secretly favoring, but I’m only slightly embarrassed to admit would have sacrificed that choice if it weren’t convenient. It just seemed like enough was enough: we’re here to do experiments, not to fiddle endlessly with Adobe products. Either the work should made public, or it shouldn’t.<\/p>\n \nLudicrous or no, in the end I was able to resubmit in under thirty minutes. Just a quick EndNote reformat, a tweak of the running title, a simple conversion of all the figures from CMYK to RGB. (And of course the cover letter \u2013 nothing amuses an editor more than reading the name of the journal you were previously sucking up to.) Blissfully the current submission system was a lot more intuitive than the previous one and, twenty-four hours later, my adopted baby was safely in peer review. It got me to thinking, though: we don’t necessarily need the utopian ideal of one universal submission template for all journals. If journals are flexible and adopt a relatively standard format, it doesn’t take long to reformat, and I think most people could spare those thirty minutes. But journals, especially in that key 5-to-8 impact factor range who bottom-feed off the rejects of their betters, beware: if you insist on having non-standard formatting or are completely rigid in some of your requirements, busy people like me will probably just shrug and choose your competitors instead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As I scanned through the bad news, I noticed with interest that my reaction was strangely muted. Of course I liked the paper and wanted it to get published, and was disappointed when “on this occasion”, the editors “regretted” to … Continue reading