The n-Category Café

At least one of your questions is answered in their FAQ: the impact factor is currently zero.

The tone of the letter sounds somewhat Langian, but I have a hard time hearing him say “pretentious”. There’s also no swearing and it doesn’t end in a scream of “Jesus!”

This is a potentially a great idea and the editors has done a great job to even set up this website!

It’s clear that papers appearing in their sections “mapping the blind alleys of science” and “reinventing the wheel” could be interesting (not sure about the other sections…). I guess it happened to everyone during a career to reinvent known things or find that something isn’t working after all for some subtle reasons, but there were no place to tell others up to know (except maybe in an appendix in a book or on a homepage, but with far less readership).

I hope some respectable folks will submit some serious stuff there even if somewhat old. For example this paper of Stallings (UC Berkeley) on how not to prove the Poincaré Conjecture is what came to my mind as a nice example of such papers. There are probably many more out there or in dusty drawers.

Isabel (of God Plays Dice fame) asks the question, “isn’t this what, say, blogs are for?” Perhaps having a journal of “things you’d otherwise post in a blog” might save mathematicians the trouble of maintaining their own blog, and perhaps publication in such a journal would look better on your CV (guest posts at the n-Category Café don’t count towards tenure, do they?). However, if Rej. Math. doesn’t have a very good review process of its own, I doubt one’s colleagues would care about publication in it.

Why not just use arxiv?

Cool! I’ve just submitted a paper formally to Rejecta Mathematica.

The quote must be from one of Doron Zeilberger’s rants!

Mind you, I’ve had many papers rejected. But the average editor or referee has had something constructive to say, which makes my next paper, on average, slightly better.

When entangled referees fight with each other, or the editor, there’s even more to be gained.

Another reason why referees can be useful, and arXiv dangerous, is that any normal referee would have told the author:

“The scientist in question has the last name Hooke, not Hook. Fix the 7 of those on pp.22-23, and then we’ll talk about the substance of the paper. Meanwhile, I suggest not sending it to arXiv.”

arXiv:0711.4507 [pdf]
Title: The Second Law as a Cause of the Evolution
Authors: Oded Kafri
Comments: 30 pages, 3 figures
Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

It is a common belief that in any environment where life is possible, life will be generated. Here it is suggested that the cause for a spontaneous generation of complex systems is probability driven processes. Based on equilibrium thermodynamics, it is argued that in low occupation number statistical systems, the second law of thermodynamics yields an increase of thermal entropy and a canonic energy distribution. However, in high occupation number statistical systems, the same law for the same reasons yields an increase of information and a Benford’s law/power-law energy distribution. It is therefore, plausible, that eventually the heat death is not necessarily the end of the universe.

By the way, I first read Rudy Rucker in a magazine called Unearth, which required the authors to have been previously unpublished. A science fiction anthology of rejected stories by subsequently successful authors, with prefaces to each story, might be very useful to the novice author.

The Writers of the Future anthology also limits the number of prior sales and author can have made.

And stories about the end of the universe are fun.

I was just recently told that the folks over in biomedicine have a Journal of Negative Results. They advertise themselves as covering “all aspects of unexpected, controversial, provocative and/or negative results/conclusions in the context of current tenets, providing scientists and physicians with responsible and balanced information to support informed experimental and clinical decisions.”

They’re open-access, too.

The low quality correspondence with referees is in fact public. I mean the referee has no right to disclose it, as the paper which is submitted is secret before published and so on. But the submitter of the papaer, in my experience, never signs any secrecy as of the correspondence with the journal.

Which journals have the interest IN MAINTAINING THEIR QUALITY IN REFEREEING by EXPLICITLY adhereing to policy of having NO OBJECTIONS to the right of author to publicly publish complete corrrespondence in the refereeing process, regardless of whether it is favorable or unfavorable to any party involved? This will e.g. single out those editors who neglect serious observations of referees uncareful/erroneous statements etc. and the journals who flourish by advertising a quick reviewing process with the expense of allowing incomplete and erroneous reviews, either positive or negative.

if rejecta mathematica accepts rejected papers then why does it reject others?