Send us your rejects: Rejecta Mathematica goes live

A while back, we mentioned a new mathematics journal with an unusual twist on peer review. Rejecta Mathematica was founded with the mission of publishing articles that had actually been rejected by journal editors and peer reviewers, based on the reasoning that even mistakes can contain valuable information. The risk, of course, is that the journal would be nothing more than an outlet for cranks and the bile of scorned authors. The first issue is now out, and there’s no shortage of bile, but there’s also some fairly solid research and glimpses of how the online world has changed publishing.

Rejecta Mathematica, which is online only and open access, has some simple rules for publication. Papers had to be submitted for peer review at one or more other journals, and they had to have been rejected, either by the journal’s editors or the paper’s reviewers. The papers authors could then send a letter that describes the reason for rejection, along with the paper itself, to Rejecta, which would publish both as a single document.

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