Music To A Science Geek's Inbox.

WhatDoesEurekaHaveToDoWithIt

AnywayVille

Our latest paper has been a real battle with the reviewers.

When we first submitted it earlier in the new year the reviewers were generally supportive but they had a lot of questions and concerns. They also asked for a significant number of new experiments before they would decide if our conclusions are truly supported by the data presented. 

That last one is the crucial bit - and that is really the job of concscientious peer-reviewers who are also experts in the field to ensure that the decision is made with rigour.

Of course, any and all  high-faluting 'this is just how science should work' talk was no consolation for the grad student and the post-doc that had already done a lot of work and who would now have to do even more slogging.

Which they did over a period of months. And the revised paper we sent back the journal, with reams of new data and a 12 page, single-spaced rebuttal to the original reviews (which was my job), was much, much improved.

Anyway, that revision went in a couple of weeks ago.

And then, late yesterday, an Email arrived from the editor. The following was buried under the lede:

Reviewer #1 (Comments to the Author):

The authors thoroughly answered all my concerns.

Reviewer #2 (Comments to the Author):

All of the revision changes are acceptable.

Reviewer #3 (Comments to the Author):

The authors addressed and resolved all my concerns raised in the first review.

The upshot is that the paper is now, finally, 'in-press'  and it will be published once we complete the final administrative and editorial (i.e. not scientific) revisions, which I'll work on next week.

In the meantime, this is usually the point in the process where that grad student and that post-doc that did so much of the work on the revisions would get to shoot champagne corks down the long hallway outside my office.*

Here's hoping we can all get together to do that, for real, in a few weeks.

______

*During the post-acceptance, paper-in-press celebrations my job is to wait about halfway down the hallway, hidden in the alcove entrance to the lab, while the kids who really did the work shake the bubbly and pop the corks.. An angle slightly above horizontal seems to be best as the goal is to send the corks flying, jumping and rolling as far down the hallway as possible. That's when I pop out with a sharpie in hand (green is best/lasts longest) to mark the distance travelled with the person's name, the paper, and the year down low where the wall meets the floor...The farthest mark ever, about 60 feet I reckon, was generated by a kid in 2010 who no longer is one (a kid I mean)...In fact, he has a lab of his own now in the Canuckistanian center of the universe and I'm pretty sure he has already started stealing grants that might otherwise have been meant for us (which is just as it should be, of course).



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