Are editors of ecological journals good oracles? A reply to Schimel et al. (2014) about the malpractice of editorial rejections

Abstract

In an earlier work, we found that 66% of manuscripts that suffered editorial rejections were finally accepted in journals of similar ranking to which they were originally submitted. We thus concluded that editors appear to be “poor oracles” with regards to being able evaluate the quality of a manuscript without the help of external reviewers. This article was recently criticized by the team of editors of the Ecological Society of America. In this work, we clarify some misunderstandings and offer new evidence supporting our view that external reviews should be the rule in the process of publishing scientific literature. Specifically, here we argue that (a) the claim that editorial rejections are based on manuscripts not adjusting to the journal’s scope rather than on academic quality is unconvincing; (b) if academic quality is being assessed to decide the fate of a submitted paper, this attribute must be evaluated including several external opinions and not only the superficial reading of one person, (c) our survey design was appropriate and, despite the small sample size, the conclusion that editors are poor oracles seems to be fairly reliable and, (d) the practice of sending the majority of submitted papers to external review should not cause the collapse of most popular journals. We insist that for the sake of science, editors need the opinion of external experts and should not act as oracles.