I report below Ross Street's response to my request of clarification (in italic), followed by my answer to it.
Dear Olivia
This is to
confirm that I read your email with the six questions.
However, I am
not well enough familiar with your work, or the persistent hostility to
it, to answer them.
I am afraid we
all receive referees’ reports that make us angry in one way or another.
The system is far from perfect. As an editor of too many journals, I
have **great** difficulty finding referees who will agree to do the job
(no time, signed the petition against Elsevier, only expert in one
aspect of the paper, or whatever).
Once I have
asked everyone I can think of, including the referees suggested by the
author, and all I am left with is some minimalist report, I’ll send the
report. The impression I am forced to accept is that nobody is much
interested in the paper. Of course, the paper may be perfectly correct,
it may be ahead of its time, it may have taken a lot of work, and so on.
But a judgement has to be made so that the author, editor and
journal can get on with their next steps.
Kind regards and
best wishes for the future, Ross
Dear Professor Street,
Many thanks for your
response. I appreciate your important commitment as Editor and
understand your difficulties in finding suitable referees. I should
clarify that I have not at all undertaken this initiative of
clarification because some papers of mine have been rejected by a
journal; in fact, I am perfectly aware that, as you point out, there is
a subjective and aleatory element inherent to any peer review. The main
reason why I have dared to write to prominent category theorists in
order to ask for a clarification is that I had received, in the context
of paper submissions, a number of rejections based on the statement that
the results of the paper were “folklore”, i.e. already known by the
experts (though never published nor publicly communicated), without any
reference being provided to justify it. Every time I have asked the
relevant editor to contact the referee who had made such statements
asking for specific references supporting his/her claims, I invariably
received the response that it was not possible to do so and that he/she
had essentially to rely on the authority of the referee. An extreme
example of this was the submission of my paper “Lattices of theories”
for publication in the proceedings of the CT2010 (more details are
available
here). I
personally think that an Editor should not accept a report containing
scientifically ungrounded statements of this kind, since they are
potentially false (the Editor is not given the means for quickly
verifying whether what the referee says is indeed correct) and, if so,
they are defamatory to the author. In fact, this initiative of
clarification has shown in particular that it can actually happen (and
even systematically so) that false allegations of non-originality are
made in the context of peer review. Independently from the possibility
of false allegations, another aspect to bear in mind is that one of the
aims of peer review should be that of helping the author to improve
his/her paper, in particular by adding and discussing references which
he/she might have missed in good faith. For these reasons, I think that
any referee that makes an accusation of non-originality to an author
concerning a given result should be required to either give the precise
reference of a published paper which contains it or show in his/her
report that the author’s result is a particular case or a
straightforward consequence of a previously published result. On the
other hand, I think that a referee has fully the right to recommend the
rejection of a paper by saying that the author’s results are not
sufficiently interesting/surprising from his/her point of view to
warrant publication or that they could be deduced from existing results
in a not particularly difficult way.
Best regards,
Olivia Caramello