So my latest paper (and my first on Martian geochemistry
rather than corals) is now online at JGR: Planets in its pre-proof form. I’ll be posting an
easy to understand summary of the science once the finalised article is up in
all of its open access glory but for now, so not to anger our publisher
overlords with potential copyright violations, here is the saga of this paper’s
epic journey through the peer-review process. I'm posting this story as it feels very disparaging getting your submissions that you've worked hard on knocked back, and I think it's good to know that behind many successful publications there is a back story of rejection and so a light at the end of the tunnel.
The work for this paper was one of the first projects I
carried out here at Imperial; investigating the relationship between the
hydration state of perchlorate salts and the temperature they decompose at.
This is an important issue as it is believed that the thermal decomposition of
these salts when heated during analysis of Martian soil may be confounding our
attempts to detect organic matter on Mars – but more on that next time.
This work was completed, written up and initially submitted to a well-known geophysical research journal back in October last year (2016). Unfortunately despite our research group having published similar themes in their before it was rejected by the editor for being ‘too specialist’. Not to be beaten, the manuscript was quickly reworked to another geochemical journal’s format and resubmitted. However, they thought it was ‘better for consideration for another journal’. It seemed salts on Mars weren’t in vogue at the moment – all the cool geo-astro-bio-chemists-or-whatver-the-hell-I-am-now are researching Enceladus now…
This work was completed, written up and initially submitted to a well-known geophysical research journal back in October last year (2016). Unfortunately despite our research group having published similar themes in their before it was rejected by the editor for being ‘too specialist’. Not to be beaten, the manuscript was quickly reworked to another geochemical journal’s format and resubmitted. However, they thought it was ‘better for consideration for another journal’. It seemed salts on Mars weren’t in vogue at the moment – all the cool geo-astro-bio-chemists-or-whatver-the-hell-I-am-now are researching Enceladus now…
After another round of reformatting (thank fuck for Mendeley
and its instantaneous citation-style-reformatting) and re-registering into
another publisher’s online submission machine we submitted to a more specialist (think space-chemistry not bondage) journal in November (2016). Thankfully, this time there was
no instantaneous letter of rejection from the editor as the manuscript was sent
out for peer review.
To those who don't know, all legitimate scientific work has to be checked over by other experts in the field before it can be released into the wider scientific community. This is the peer-review process and it keeps the amount of bad science out there down to a minimum - or at least it did until you could say whatever you wanted on the internet and people would lap it up and tinfoil hat wearing nutters started having their own journal and conferences.
We received two reviews of the paper at the beginning of
February 2017, both reviewers reasonably wanted proof that the perchlorates I
was experimenting on were indeed changing their crystal structure when dehydrated, as I hypothesised, rather than just losing superficial water. They requested, therefore, that we
carried out additional tests on the samples to prove this – by X-Ray
Diffraction (XRD). This was fair enough, it would make our argument much stronger.
Unfortunately we do not have our own XRD machine in the lab,
they’re pretty big, specialist expensive pieces of kit. Also, all of the
samples that I had used had spent much longer either in the drying oven or
exposed to the laboratory atmosphere than they had when I analysed them, this
meant the whole month-and-a-half drying
and subsequent re-exposure experiments had to be repeated on fresh perchlorate.
So, I booked time on the XRD machine next door at the Natural History Museum
and put the samples in the oven for 6 weeks at about gas mark 0.25. The flip
side to this was that I got to go behind-the-scenes at the Natural History
Museum which is always cool – getting a security pass, jumping the queues (it
was half term) and getting let through the mysterious door hidden behind the
giant sloth skeleton, going from the mad noisy crowds to the peace and quiet of
the underground laboratories. However, repeatedly running from our lab, through the
crowds of tourists on Exhibition Road carrying a lunchbox filled with nitrogen
gas to preserve my sample was interesting to say the least.
 |
| The guardian of the secret science caves (Image credit) |
While the truth was somewhat more complicated than we had expected,
the XRD data did indeed prove that the conditions we were subjecting the
samples to was enough to change their hydration state. Bolstering our
conclusions that it was changes in hydration state that were affecting the breakdown temperature. The manuscript was updated to include these findings (along with making
many more minor changes suggested by the reviewers) and sent back to review at
the end of March.
Just over a month later the second round of reviews came
back, this time they didn’t agree.
Reviewer One’s was basically,
‘Ah, I see you did as I asked and it proved your point, nice
work, this should be published 😊’
Reviewer Two on the other hand,
‘Ah, I see you did as I asked, I still don’t believe it, I
think my idea is the best, REJECTION
😞’
Unfortunately for us, although probably good for scientific
integrity, the Editor has to go with the harshest review and the paper was
rejected by the journal. I thought in this case, however, that this was unfair, after the amount of work I’d
put in to, fulfill everything this reviewer had asked for. As there was such disparity between the two reviews, it felt like they had an axe to grind, maybe they were one of the many that this work
was disagreeing with and didn't like that. Unfortunately, from talking to
people, this seems to happen a lot during the peer-review process, which isn’t cool,
if the work is solid, but doesn't agree with your ideas, then it’s up to you to
prove its wrong with your own research later, not block it from coming out,
that’s how science progresses.
So I sent a whiny letter to the editor, telling on Reviewer
Two for being mean. Surprisingly this worked and the editor promised to send
the paper out to new reviewers IF we made a few concessions and elaborated on why we
didn’t think the alternative hypothesis Reviewer Two washing pushing was
correct.
After some improvements we re-re-submitted at the end of
June, a tense few months followed as we waited to hear what the new reviewers
thought of our work – would they be kind? Thankfully both reviews we received
at the beginning of November were very positive and it only took a few days to
put right the points they made – which were mostly just things needing
re-wording to make more sense/be less ambiguous, or typos that had somehow made
it this far unspotted.
Finally on the 16 November 2017, almost exactly a year after
the first submission, the paper was accepted. The battle was over, we had won,
now to wait and see what the wider community thinks…
