Have you ever met a top scientist who is also an active journal editor? After years of patent litigation this question keeps coming up when seeking for technical help. The answer is: only seldom, since great minds usually have little interest in getting distracted. The consequences of this inverted selection are immediately apparent: deep work of profound significance is seldom published in the flashy journals with the highest impact factor. The editors, often third or fourth-tier researchers or simply science drop-outs, typically miss or mishandle the great stuff. While the research activity is heavily scrutinized, regulated and subject to stringent surveillance, the editor’s work is essentially deregulated and largely unsupervised.  The net result is that you have rogue editors, i.e. individuals who do not justify their decisions and are not held accountable for what they do in any way.     

    Each journal has their fair share of rogue editors, and magazines that fit the business model of “catering for successful people”, are loaded with them. To reduce their work load, rogue editors reject plenty of articles “in limine” without providing any justification and without peer review, as they do not care for content, only for indicators of success. When the contribution comes from, say, Harvard or Yale, and the authors have a track record of success, the rogue editor simply picks cherry reviewers likely to be favorably inclined.

   The situation turns grotesque when we deal with the so-called post-publication peer review (PPPR). Now we are dealing, not only with dropouts or ineptitude but with a Wild West scenario, a no-man’s land where literally anything goes. PPPR is obviously a misnomer: no recognizable peers of the scientists are involved in evaluating their work after it gets published, just a mob of losers. Sadly, these nobodies involved in PPPR feel entitled to opine or pass judgment, fuelled and enabled by the internet possibilities. But the scientific establishment is only to blame for this sorry state of affairs. These losers would not feel emboldened unless idiots in the scientific establishment – and trust me there are plenty – paid attention to their inanities.

   Aside from the angry mob, in PPPR a few names can be salvaged: Ivan Oransky (a.k.a. Clare Francis, Fernando Pessoa, etc. etc.) and Adam Marcus, the founders of the moribund (hopefully soon defunct!) blog “Retraction Watch”, former researcher Leonid Schneider (a.k.a. Wikipedia editor “Tryptofish”, with sock puppets “JoJoAnthrax”, etc.) and Joshua L. Cherry (a.k.a. Wikipedia editor “LongTimeObserver”, also known as “broken record”), still a decent scientist who chose to act mostly in the shadows. While “broken record” Cherry hides in anonymity to avoid the lawsuit, Schneider often invites it, and asks for money to his supporters in order to defray the trial cost and lawyer fees. In that sense, Schneider seems even more pathetic, although it is hard to tell who is more pathetic. As we can see, these individuals have different styles when it comes to deprecate others and inflict damage, with hatred becoming their unifying feature. Another common trait in both Cherry and Schneider is their sheer anger: Nothing angers them more than the success of the very people in whose downfall they invest. Sadly, the first and only victims of the hatred that these individuals harbor are of course themselves. We are talking about people who could in principle be of some modest value to society but, in the words of Ovid: Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor… (I see the good and acknowledge it, yet I follow the worse).