If the results are wrong, then following authors at least have to point out the flaws sometime during the process. I thought the point of things like OO/A are to let people know of known results before journals like SJ finish their considered process of stamping their imprimatur on papers. If the paper doesn’t get published, then R2 and QJ will simply act as if R1 and OO/A do not exist. If the paper gets rejected by SJ and my colleague then publishes in Second Tier Journal on Optimization, clearly the submission date there will be after QJs date so R2 takes precedence. Further, unless R1 gets the paper published in SJ with the March 1 submission date, QJ will not publish a precedence acknowledgement. Hold on, what? QJ and LCP are saying that they will ignore anything that is not in a peer-reviewed journal! R2 does not have to say anything about R1’s result since it has not been refereed. I hope you would agree that the fact that a paper is posted on a preprint server does not guarantee its content is valuable or even correct – such (partial) assurances can be obtained only during peer-review process. The editor’s response is:Īlso, during consultations with ’s office, it became clear that LCP does not approve of publishing a precedence acknowledgement towards a paper in public domain (preprint server). And here is where I get both confused and outraged. But at least QJ would be attempting to correct this mess. OK, what about publishing a precedence acknowledgement in the form of a letter to the editor? I find this somewhat less than satisfying since the letter to the editor is separate from the paper and no one reads journals as “issues” anymore. QJ declines to change R2’s paper since it has already been published, and the large commercial publisher (LCP) does not allow changes to published articles (and, besides, R2 won’t agree to it).
R1 contacts the editors of QJ suggesting some effort be made to correct the literature with regard to the precedence of this work. R1 lets R2 know of his paper, pointing to OO/A. two weeks after R1 posted on OO/A and submitted to SJ). The submission date of R2’s work to QJ is March 15 (i.e. QJ is a journal known for its fast turn-around time. This is not a preprint however, but an “article in advance” for a paper published in Quick and Fast Journal of Optimization, QJ. The paper contains a subset of R1’s results with no reference to R1’s work.
On August 1, R1 received a perky email from researcher R2 with a paper attached saying “Thought you might be interested!”. The paper began its slow and arduous thorough refereeing at SJ. He also posted the paper on the well-known eprint servers Optimization Online and ArXiv (OO/A). He wrote up the results and on March 1 submitted the paper to The Slow but Prestigious Journal of Optimization, which I will call SJ (the characters get confusing, so the inset Cast of Characters may help). My colleague, call him R1, proved a couple theorems in a fast-moving subfield of optimization. I’d love some feedback to help me understand what went wrong here. A situation has occurred with one of my colleagues that has made me question my understanding of precedence of research results. Now that I have moved (at least partially!) into academic administration, my colleagues ask for advice on publishing strategy.