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7/15/2009

The Way I See It
The lessons of rejection shouldn't be overlooked

BY MARK DAVENPORT, JASON LASKA, CHRISTOPHER ROZELL AND MICHAEL WAKIN
Special to the Rice News

The idea for Rejecta Mathematica came while the four of us were eating lunch in Duncan Hall, discussing one of our own rejected papers. "What if there were an academic journal that published only papers rejected by other journals?" As graduate students, we had a lot to learn before starting a project like this. But now, three years later, we are happy to announce that the inaugural issue of our open-access journal Rejecta Mathematica is available at http://math.rejecta.org.

	MARK DAVENPORT (LEFT) AND JASON LASKA
	CHRISTOPHER ROZELL	MICHAEL WAKIN

From the beginning, the questions we've been asked most often are "Why are you doing this?" and "Is it a joke?" While we must admit that we have had fun in this process, we hope that our first issue will serve as definitive proof that Rejecta Mathematica is not a joke. Our goal is to make a positive and valuable contribution to the mathematical sciences research community, and there are several ways that Rejecta Mathematica can do that.

First, there is ample evidence that in the traditional review process, significant (even Nobel Prize-winning) research is occasionally overlooked and groundbreaking work is sometimes actively shunned. While it would be presumptuous for us to assume that we can spot significant work that others might have missed, we can provide a venue to introduce rejected work to the community and increase the chances that its value will be appreciated sooner rather than later.

Second, there is also evidence that a research community can derive value from a free, centralized repository of rejected papers, even when (and perhaps especially when) the results are either incorrect or not significant enough to warrant consideration for a major international prize. Rejecta Mathematica can benefit authors looking for feedback on their work, wanting to warn the community against false starts or wanting to shine a light on the occasional vagaries of the peer-review process. Our journal will also benefit readers who want access to "minor results" that are useful but not otherwise publishable.

Third, every paper appearing in Rejecta Mathematica will include an open letter from its authors discussing the paper’s original review process, disclosing any known flaws in the paper and stating the case for the paper’s value to the community. We actually view the open letters as being at least as important as the technical content in the research articles. The open letters are where the authors can both tell the backstory of the paper and convey the lessons learned from the rejection. Undoubtedly, many open letters will provide a frank commentary on the peer-review process. Some may even be controversial. At the very least, they should help others benefit from the mistakes of their peers.

Finally, we would be remiss not to mention that being researchers ourselves, at some level we simply wanted to conduct a unique socio-academic experiment: If we build Rejecta Mathematica and ask for papers, what will happen? Will we get any papers, and if so, will they all be the delusional output of mathematical cranks? (This has been a common conjecture.) And if we do get misguided nonsense, should we publish it?

We've decided against publishing everything we receive. Instead, we will try to choose papers that allow some opportunity for learning. For example, we do not see much value to the community in publishing papers that were rejected solely for their incomprehensibility. While we don't anticipate accepting such papers, we would encourage any interested party to start the Journal of Impenetrable Results to give them a home.

As for our editorial process, it includes no technical peer review, and hence our slogan, "Caveat Emptor." Rather than peer review, we are relying on the technical review provided by the journal from which the paper was originally rejected, and we'll focus on selecting papers based on their apparent potential interest to researchers in the mathematical sciences. Of course, this does raise an interesting paradox: What happens when a paper gets rejected from Rejecta Mathematica? Will the universe cease to exist?

In producing our inaugural issue, we were delighted to find the submissions ran the gamut of genres we hoped to feature in the journal: minor or traditionally unpublishable results, nontraditional ideas and proof techniques, misunderstood genius, results based on questionable assumptions, and controversial papers and open letters. We hope this issue is the first of many, and now that it's published, we want to know what others think of it. For more information and to read our inaugural issue, visit us at http://math.rejecta.org.

--Mark Davenport (Rice M.S. 2007, B.S. 2004, B.A. 2004) and Jason Laska are graduate students in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice; Christopher Rozell (Rice Ph.D. 2007, M.S. 2002) is an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology; and Michael Wakin (Rice Ph.D. 2007, M.S. 2002, B.S. 2000, B.A. 2000) is an assistant professor at the Colorado School of Mines.