Logical Biology 7 (4): 100-103, 2007	REFLECTION
http://logibio.com
© Truthfinding Cyberpress (http://im1.biz/tfcp)	REJECTION DISPLAY

Rejections by the “Top” Journals: The End of a 3-year “Stamp” Collection

Shi V. Liu

Eagle Institute of Molecular Medicine

Apex, NC 27502, USA

Corresponding with SVL@logibio.com

(Received 2007-12-20; revised 2007-12-31; accepted 2007-12-31; published 2007-12-31)

HIGHLIGHT

The 2007 collection of rejections on Shi V. Liu’s submissions to the “top” journals is displayed here. With this final display a mission dedicated for probing the high-level corruption in the “top” journals also ends with its expected goal.

ABSTRACT

Starting from 2005 I have been keeping my persistent submissions to various “impact factor”-wise “top” journals. My goal was not to get a publication there to boost my career but to find out to how scientific and ethical these “top” journals are. Now this three-year-long probing process has achieved its goal of collecting enough evidence to demonstrate the largely corrupted nature of “top” journals. Thus, this year’s rejection display will be my last display of rejection “stamps” from those “top” journals.

KEY WORDS

Rejection, Top journal, Criticism, Communication, Editorial prejudice, Publishing misconduct, Stamp

2007 has now come to an end. It is the time of year to count how many papers that I have submitted to the “top’ journals and how many were actually being rejected.

It is amazing that, among 74 submissions to CNSP (Cell, Nature, Science, PNAS) journals, only one was accepted but published as a much shortened Correspondence (Nature 447: 1052, 2007). All others were rejected but none of the rejections were defensible. Sometimes my earlier submissions were rejected but then, months later, other submissions expressing the same or similar views to my earlier submissions were actually accepted for publication. On some occasions, my Communications Arising or Technical Comments were rejected by unethical peer-review process and, in one case, the peer-review even contained obvious “collaboration” and beneficiary “plagiarism”.

With the strong spinning on the so-called “milestone” discovery in the “therapeutic” cloning by the CNS journals but a sudden unexplained falling down of the iPS “airplane” in Science and Nature at least, the unscientific and unethical nature of the “top” journal became self-evident. Thus, without to much elaboration, I wish let the facts speak out. The facts are contained in the rejection “stamps” that I have collected over the last three years.

This year’s rejection display is important because it has reached a decisive turning point – we have enough evidence to demonstrate the fundamental problems in the publishing process in the “top” journals. That is, they make selection decision not on any true scientific basis and they reject criticism just to save their own faces.

However, history will be eventually truth-revealing, especially with the increasing passing of time. But to achieve this goal, record-keeping is very important. That is why I have kept this practice of publishing list of rejections from the “top” journals.

Table 1. Shi V. Liu’s 2007 Collection of Rejections from Traditional Journals.

No.	Title	Submitted (mm-dd)	Rejected by	Published In 2007*
1	Another new accommodating evidence for an old cell life theory	01-11	Nature	Unpub
2	Biology’s revolution or biologists’ confusion	01-25	Nature	LB 7: 3
3	A deeper insight for early differentiation	01-25	Nature	TW 2: 1
4	More insight on asymmetric distribution of mother versus daughter centrosome	01-26	Science	TW 2: 3
5	What is a stem cell?	01-29 01-31	Cell Stem Cells	LB 7: 12
6	Use saved money for understanding the other side of the coin	01-30	Nat. Genet.	LB 7: 18
7	Later local observations should respect earlier global discoveries	01-31	Science	SE 2: 1
8	Liu’s message blocked by “top” journals	02-28	Cell	SE 2: 5
9	Touching heart in person versus reporting truth to public	02-28	Science	SE 2: 38
10	Hiding truth is more harmful than faking discovery	03-13	Nature	SE 2: 3
11	Biologists’ deep conceptual confusion	03-19	Nature	??
12	Respecting published answers for important questions on epigenetics	03-20	Cell	TW 2: 19
13	A deep insight on immune memory	03-23	Science	LB 7: 34
14	Cell division deception and stem cell confusion	03-26	Cell-Stem Cell	P 2: 7
15	Save your writings, especially rejected manuscripts, and share them with public today	04-11	Nature	P 2: 11
16	Too many money-seeking but too few truth-finding scientists	04-19	Nature	Unpub
17	Does differentiating germ cells really revert into functional stem cells in Drosophila melanogaster ovaries?	04-22	Nature	LB 7: 23
18	Questions on the reversibility and regeneration of spermatogenesis	04-22	Dev. Cell	LB 7: 41
19	No real evidence for round trip in spermatogenesis	04-23	Cell	LB 7: 26
20	Was germline stem cells really regenerated from spermatogonial dedifferentiation?	04-23	Science	LB 7: 20
21	No convincing evidence for conversion of neurogenic precursors into stem cells	04-23	Neuron	LB 7: 44
22	Nilsson and science owe public more answers than a simple retraction	04-26	Science	SE 2: 41
23	Hwang’s retracted publication still contributes to science’s impact factor	04-26	Science	SE 2: 44
24	Purging immortality claims one by one	04-26	Science	TW 2: 10
25	More accommodating evidence for an old cell life theory	04-26	Nature	Unpub
26	Re-invention and distortion in Nature	04-27	Nature	SE 2: 46
27	Action needed against reinvention and distortion	04-28	Blood	SE 2: 46
28	More answers needed for resolving the mystery on publishing the flowering paper	05-04	Nature	TW 2: 12
29	The unethical “first” discoveries	05-10	Nature	TW 2: 14
30	High retraction rate and high impact factor go hand-in-hand	05-16	Nature	Unpub
31	Has the process of knowledge creation really changed?	05-19	Science	TW 2: 41
32	Award true discovery not just high impact publication	05-19	Nature	Unpub
33	Open review failures and the likely reasons	05-23	Nature	?? 1: 85
34	A high time for understanding the correct temporal order of epigenetics	05-29	Nature	P 2: 16
35	A well expected observation and a shameful re-discovery	05-30	PLoS Biol.	TW 2: 21
36	A revolution needed to open journals’ records	06-01	Nature	P 2: 14
37	Stop a fundamental cheating in reporting cloning research	06-11	Nature	TW 2: 25
38	When to retract a publication and who should make the decision?	06-24	Science	TW 2: 35
39	IPS cells: stem cells induced from terminally differentiated cells or just pre-existing stem cells being detected?	07-19	Nature	LB 7: 63
40	Egg- or embryo-free creation of patient-specific stem cells from skin cells: give me a break	07-19	Nature	TW 2: 37
41	Immortal strand does not exist but nonrandom strand segregation should be universal	07-22	Cell	LB 7: 50
42	In division we lose	07-23	Nature	P 2: 27
43	It is time to call a mother cell the mother cell!	07-23	PLoS Biol.	Pub as Comment
44	On the relationship between cancer stem cells and tumor growth	07-31	Science	IM 2: 1
45	Multicellular life is mosaic at various levels	07-31	Science	LB 7: 61
46	A proactive measure for preventing plagiarism and misappropriation of credit as well as improving the quality of publications	08-07	Nature	SE 2: 75
47	A natural outcome long-predicted by an alternative theory on the origin and evolution of life	08-10	Nature	TW 2: 47
48	An alternative view on nonrandom DNA segregation and cell life	08-10	Cell.	Unpub
49	The harms of suppression to science	08-12	Science	SE 2: 77
50	Are iPS cells really indistinguishable from ES cells?	09-12	Nature	LB 7: 66
51	Some PhD scientists do not respect philosophy at all	09-14	Nature	TW 2: 49
52	Honesty in scientific debate and ethics for scientific research	09-15	Science	SE 2: 102
53	Comments on Cokol et al’s response (Logic and integrity in scientific debate on impact factor and retraction)	09-16	EMBO Rep.	TW 2: 57
54	Neglected modern theories on inheritance and evolution	09-17	EMBO Rep.	P 2: 32
55	False claims in publications should be retracted	09-18	Science	SE 2: 104
56	Address existing knowledge rather than keep groping in the darkness	09-20	Nature	TW 2: 51
57	Flawed impact factor severely undervalued the true impact of medical hypotheses	09-24	Med. Hypotheses	TW 2: 61
58	An unconvincing study adding more confusion to misunderstanding of cell life	09-25	Nature	LB 7: 76
59	Old answers to deep questions in the tree of life	10-05	Science	TW 2: 65
60	Nobel prize goes trivial and late again	10-08	Nature	TW 2: 63
61	Better knowledge on life and evolution for correct understanding of race differences	10-22	Nature	TW 2: 72
62	Taking Watson’s fall for science’s gain	10-24	Nature	NatureNews
63	Retraction of what? And why?	10-25	Science	TW 2: 79
64	Sizing down life and death	11-07	PNAS	TW 2: 83
65	Directions for ageing studies	11-12	Nature	TW 2: 87
66	Nuclear transplantation-derived embryonic stem cells are distinct from those emerging from fertilization	11-18	PNAS	LB 7: 91
67	Alternative views on the formation of iPS cells	11-25	Science	LB 7: 94
68	Induction of pluripotency: where is the evidence?	11-25	Cell	TW 2: 94
69	Western ‘radars’ should detect Chinese ‘airplanes’	12-06	Nature	TW 2: 97
70	A real therapeutic stem cell ‘airplane’ in China	12-06	Science	TW 2: 99
71	Invalidating the induction claim and adopting an activation mechanism for stem cells useful for regenerative medicine	12-08	Science	LB 7: 96
72	Bias and discrimination in Science	12-13	Science	SE 2: 110
73	Further comments on the relationship between cancer stem cells and tumor growth	12-14	Science	IM 2:3

* Abbreviations for new-generation journals. LB = Logical Biology, SE = Scientific Ethics, P = Pioneer, TW = Top Watch, IM = International Medicine. All of these journals can be found at http://im1.biz