[Corpora-List] publishing lists of rejected and accepted papers

[Alon Lischinsky]

On 2011/10/17 Kim Witten <kimwitten at gmail.com> wrote:

>  A persistent record of those rejections – available for the judgment
> of others, or perhaps as a reminder to myself of my "failures", or for
> the public display of my colleagues' "failures" – is not very conducive
> to creating the type of mutually-beneficial, academically-inspiring
> linguistic community we want, IMHO.

Why not? Or, more specifically: we all know everyone gets papers,
grant requests and job applications rejected. Which is the advantage
of purposefully degrading the quality of publicly-available
information, so that we only receive details of successful bids?

> Additionally, there are lots of rationales for why papers get rejected,
> some of them having to do with timing or goodness-of-fit for the
> publication. But regardless of the reason, I would hate to have
> rejected work out there in some marked form that preempts its
> successful presentation to the academic community.

I don't see why a public record of rejections should cause research to
be permanently barred from publication. A MS can change significantly
between revisions, or be presented to a more fitting venue after a
rejection, both of which are perfectly good reasons for a
once-rejected paper being accepted later.

> In sum, publishing rejections seems like a solution to a valid problem
> that actually creates a bigger, unintended set of problems. I don't see
> why it is necessary, given the drawbacks that it might entail.

I don't dispute that there might be problems in this course of action,
but so far nobody has convincingly presented the alleged drawbacks. It
would probably be more helpful for the discussion if someone did.

A.

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