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Doron Zeilberger's 61st Opinion

5 November 2004

Every now and then, I enjoy reading Doron Zeilberger's opinions. They are always thought provoking and interesting, whether one agrees with them or not.

The latest of his opinions, viz. opinion 61, expresses his view that editors and publishers should be made accountable for their rejections. Reading that piece will strike a chord with many of us, I believe. Indeed, we all have stories to recount about papers we had rejected when we believed they were amongst our best work. Authors are, of course, inherently biased, but sometimes referees, editors, program committees and evaluation committees for academic positions, promotions or tenure, make decisions that Time, the great judge, proves badly wrong.

One example I heard from the author himself is the submission history of the original paper by David Harel on Statecharts. That paper was rejected by several outlets before being accepted by Science of Computer Programming. Now this paper is the fifth most cited one in Computer Science according to CiteSeer (July 2004).

In the case of tenure, I once heard that Stephen Cook of NP-completeness fame was not given tenure by UC Berkeley. He then went on to gain all the most distinguished awards in our field.

I myself have received some very poetic referee reports that sometimes led to the rejection of some of my papers. I wasn't happy at the outcome of my submissions, but the reports were so poetic that I still treasure them. Here are two examples:

1. "Thus the exercise of this paper is like a cartographic expedition that explores in microscopic detail some utterly remote and obscure area at the end of the world. Mathematically nice but not relevant." (The paper in question was then accepted for STACS 2001, and a revised and expanded version of it now appears in Information and Computation.)
2. "It is strange and wonderful to observe the unbounded depths to which scientists will delve into a subject, once they have started investigating it. However, there is a limit to the depth to which others can be expected to follow them and remain fascinated by what they find there.
   Since this result, though unflawed, does not shine by its own light and the authors make no attempt to polish it or show where it may be used, I recommend to reject it for publication." (The paper in question was then accepted in revised form for Information Processing Letters by the late Harald Ganzinger.)

In this job one needs a thick skin, as Matthew Hennessy once told me.