Today I received the dreaded e-mail that I had been waiting for since last October. This is the response that I received:
Dear Dr Lintinen,
Your manuscript entitled "The Mathematical Principles of All Physical Interactions Based on the Refraction of Elemental Particles of Energy" has now been reviewed. Any reviewer comments on the suitability of your manuscript have been appended below. As a result, I regret to inform you that we cannot publish your manuscript in Scientific Reports.
You will see that, while your work is of interest, substantive concerns were raised that suggest that your paper does not fulfil the publication requirements for Scientific Reports that is, that papers must be technically sound in method and analysis. Unfortunately, these reservations are sufficiently important to preclude publication of this study in Scientific Reports.
Editor comments
Thank you for submitting your manuscript to Scientific Reports. Please accept our sincere apologies for the delay in getting back to you. More so, as we have to inform you that we cannot consider this manuscript further. In this case, we find that there is no clear, valid original contribution, over the already existing literature. Unfortunately, these reservations are serious enough to preclude the publication of this study at Scientific Reports.
Thank you for the opportunity to consider your work. I am sorry that we cannot be more positive on this occasion and hope you will not be deterred from submitting future work to Scientific Reports.
If you read the response carefully, it says: “Any reviewer comments on the suitability of your manuscript have been appended below”. However, if you read the mail, there are no reviewer comments. Despite this, the editor says “As a result, I regret to inform you that we cannot publish your manuscript in Scientific Reports.”
There is a rather cryptic phrase “You will see that, while your work is of interest, substantive concerns were raised that suggest that your paper does not fulfil the publication requirements for Scientific Reports that is, that papers must be technically sound in method and analysis.” However, no such comments were included in the email, apart from the above phrase. The editor just says that the paper is not technically sound in method and analysis, but does not specify anything more specific.
Even more perplexing is the statement “In this case, we find that there is no clear, valid original contribution, over the already existing literature.” No other paper exists in the literature proposing an elementary particle of energy. So, the contribution is clearly original. This means that the editor, or possibly reviewers, deems the paper not to be valid. However, he provides absolutely no argument for this statement. I should just accept that the paper is not valid, because the editor says so.
As I received no clear comments from the reviewers, I am unsure whether the paper has been truly peer reviewed. It seems that the editor has attempted to find peer reviewers and has received vague rejections to his queries, stating that the paper is not valid. But from the editor’s response, it seems that despite it having been nominally under peer review for half a year, it hasn’t properly been peer-reviewed.
It seems that after being frustrated by the lack of peer reviewers, the editor has decided to act as a peer reviewer instead, but not doing a very good job at that.
I am fully aware that the manuscript had some flaws, which I’m currently in the process of correcting. However, these flaws are not sufficiently dire to warrant this kind of a non-scientific rejection.
I sent a response to the editor, asking for specific comments from the reviewers that I can respond to. If the only comment from reviewers is that the paper is not valid, it is impossible to respond properly without sounding like Monty Python’s argument clinic:
I hope I’ll get somewhere with my request. If it seems today’s e-mail wasn’t sufficient, I can always send an official appeal. This is what I did over a year ago when I received the first rejection. I think I have even better grounds this time.
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