Today’s post is a quickie. Just as I feared my case wasn’t strong enough for the manuscript to be accepted for peer review in Nature. The response that I received was:
In the present case, while your findings may well prove stimulating to others' thinking about such questions, we are unable to conclude that the work provides the sort of firm advance in general understanding that would warrant publication in Nature. We therefore feel that the paper would find a more suitable outlet in a specialist journal.
With this sentence, it’s pretty much impossible to argue with the statement. The important phrase is “firm advance in general understanding”. The word firm basically means that the editor doesn’t have confidence that the paper will have an immediate impact. Between the lines it also means that the editor doesn’t really believe this to be the theory of everything, but this is a polite way of not saying this explicitly.
However, luckily I still have my old “counterevidence paper” sort of under peer review at Scientific Reports. Or more specifically, I have been given right to appeal to its initial rejection. Back in February I said:
It will take a while until the revised manuscript is ready, but much longer for the reviewers to give their comments. I'd be positively surprised if a second round of revision was enough.
It’s been over eight months since I received the right to appeal. I had already considered that what I was working on was a new paper altogether. However, as I got my foot through the door once with the counterevidence paper, it would be a bit silly not to take advantage of this opportunity. Scientific Reports isn’t nearly as high in prestige as Nature, but really, who cares? If the article is published and the theory will gain acceptance, no one cares where the article was published. Here is a good article on all the Nobel-winning articles first submitted to Nature and then submitted and accepted elsewhere.
Enrico Fermi submitted a paper describing fundamental forces of nature to the journal Nature. It was rejected, so he resubmitted to the German journal Zeitschrift für Physik, which published his work. This paper went on to be the foundation of the research that won Fermi the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Also
Hans Krebs submitted his paper on the citric acid cycle to the journal Nature but it was rejected. So, he resubmitted to the Dutch journal Enzymologia, which published the paper, and in 1953 Krebs won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery of the citric acid cycle.
And the article goes on to list several similar examples. The advice in the article is:
If your paper is rejected by Clinical and Experimental Optometry – or any other journal for that matter – do not despair; just shrug your shoulders, draw in a deep breath, take note of the comments of the reviewers of your paper, and submit elsewhere. You never know what might happen next.
So, this is what I’m going to do. So, next we’ll see what Scientific Reports has to say.
And just to get your attention, here is a the deuterium orbital that follows almost perfectly the old logic of the post I wrote a year ago, but this time actually plotted using one of the equations in my Theory of Everything -manuscript.
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