The System Works....Occasionally

I've said some pretty nasty things about Reviewer 2 in the past, they always seem intent on screwing us over in some way or another. However, we've just had a paper accepted for publication and this manuscript's journey through the system has finally (after 3 prior publications) shown me how the system is supposed to work.

My previous manuscript had a rather rocky journey to publication, with numerous rejections from editors (too specialist interest) and having to appeal the decision of a particularly arsey Reviewer 2 who suggested rejection even after we'd done all they'd asked - months of extra experimentation.

This time, the reviewers - especially Reviewer 2 - picked apart the gaps and weaknesses in the manuscript that were mostly in there as we forget that outside our tiny lab other people have other ways of thinking about things so we need to explain everything:

'please elaborate...'

'how do you justify using this technique/sample...?'

'why did you not do it this way rather than the way I'd do it...?',

They also found a (rather glaring) omission, we'd been using carbon monoxide/carbon dioxide ratios detected by the GC-MS as a quick proxy for the survival of excess organic carbon on combustion - but had offered no proof that this actually worked other than theoretically, oops!

And they used their expertise to suggest how we could fix these problems to make the study better, all written in the sort of way that suggested they were genuinely interested in our findings and wanted to help.

Yes, this resulted in extra lab time to do a few more experiments (and the odd bit of swearing at the mass spectrometer), but the extra work gathered greatly strengthened the manuscript - and I made a real pretty new figure with the new data. 

When it came back from its second round of review Reviewer 1 was happy and Reviewer 2 had a few very minor comments, the worst of which just needed me to delete a sentence where I'd slipped into what could be construed as somewhat wild over speculation about some of the Mars data.

I genuinely mean the thanks to the two (anonymous) reviewers in the acknowledgements this time, they really did make the science better.

This is how the peer review system is supposed to work.

Don't be a dick.