Kevin Vranes has a phud in Physical Ocean- ography and Cli- matology. He now studies sci- ence policy and politics at the Another thing that passed by in my December frenetic haze. It's been covered by a few of the blogs in this circle (by that I mean the ones I link to and that link to me), so many of you are going to know about this, but many won't.
That is, that James Annan and Julia Hargreaves got thoroughly screwed by Geophysical Research Letters. You can read James' recounting of his editorial treatment there, and WC's take here.
My FWIW is this: I've reviewed plenty of papers, a few for GRL. (In fact, I have one due in a few days for J. of Climate - better get crackin' since I haven't even glanced at it yet.) I've probably recommended more often than not that papers not be published and I doubt I've ever let a paper off with less than major revisions. Once I went so far as to write the editorial assistant for JPO to make sure she understood beyond any shadow of doubt I might have left in my official review that the paper was utter crap and shouldn't be published. She replied that in many years of doing that job, it was the first time anybody had told her something like that. So I can't exactly call myself a generous reviewer. But when I originally read the Annan/Hargreaves paper my first thought was, "Wow, that's a great paper."
That's one thing. The other is how easy it is to get published in GRL (or, for an alterative way of looking at it, how many papers GRL publishes). [ok, there goes any future I had of getting a GRL pub .... I guess I'll have to rest on the two or three I already have there]. Far as I can tell, GRL does not reject manuscripts, especially when they have the reviews that Annan/Hargreaves got. That's the real story here. So I'm with James on this.
Comments
# 1 | James Annan | December 21, 2006 6:31 AM
But when I originally read the Annan/Hargreaves paper my first thought was, "Wow, that's a great paper."
Aww, shucks (blush). I should have put you as a referee. OTOH you don't say what your second thought was :-)
# 2 | kevin v | December 21, 2006 2:09 PM
ok, maybe I should have wrote "really good" instead of "great"
8-)
Actually, my second thought was, "I've gotta bolster my knowledge on Bayesian methods b/c this stuff could really help me in my research."
# 3 | William Connolley | December 21, 2006 6:14 PM
Good post - maybe if the blogosphere gets up in arms GRL can be shamed. Maybe you could interest Prometheus in this?
# 4 | James Annan | December 21, 2006 9:22 PM
Thanks for the support, but I'm not sure it is worth getting too excited about it. Actually RPjr did mention it some time ago, and as he suggests, I'm sure plenty of worse things have happened...his post did provoke the usual Carl Christensen frothing, of course.
TBH from my POV the arbitrary decisions of a few editors isn't really what matters, so much as how climate scientists themselves respond (implicitly, if not explicitly) to what we've written.