I have received peer reviewers comments on a paper I submitted to a reputed journal. After consideration, I have modified my arguments to be compliant with these reviewer comments. When I submitted these corrected arguments, the journal has rejected my work without supplying any reason at all in the rejection notice. I appealed this decision making it clear that my arguments were now in compliance with reviewer comments and seeking a reason that my work was rejected. I am now pursuing the matter with COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics).
The mechanics of the situation are quite complicated... This is the simplest way I can explain it. My first submission consisted of the following steps:
Suppose there exists an overarching, immutable statement S that we accept to be true.
Consider also some statement R that is widely accepted to be true.
Now I present independent arguments to claim that statement E is true. This claim remains uncontested by the editor.
If E is true I invoke S to claim that F must also be true.
Further, I assert that if F is true, then R conflicts with S.
Since two truths cannot contradict each other and since S supersedes R in the ordo cognoscendi, I claim we must reject R over S.
After 17 attempts of submitting the same arguments to the same journal and being rejected without any reason supplied, I finally approached COPE. On insistence from COPE, the editor justified their rejections claiming that statement F cannot possibly be true. Instead they claimed statement F is false, therefore my assertion that R conflicts with S must also be false. Now comes the matter of accountability and being bound to their comments. I believe that the editor is now bound to the consequences of statement F being false. Therefore, in my next submission,
I invoked statement S to generalise statement E into statement G. This claim remains uncontested.
I then invoked statement S to claim that if statement G is true and statement F (as asserted by the editor) is false then R still conflicts with S.
The editor is probably uncomfortable with this argument because statement R is widely accepted to be true. They continue to reject my argument without supplying any reason. In fact statement R is usually written as,
$\gamma = \frac{1}{\sqrt{1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}}}$
Why this odd strategy on my part? Believe me, I could see no other way to do it. Setting aside this particular case, I wish to address the general matter of accountability in scholarly peer review ask the question, "Are editors bound to the theoretical and experimental outcomes of the comments they supply?"
