Challenging the Desk-Rejection Dogma - yueliusd’s Substack

Challenging the Desk-Rejection Dogma

The next time a “copy-pasted” desk rejection lands in your inbox, consider saying, convincingly, “I respectfully disagree.”

Yue Liu, The Reluctance to Criticize the Errors of the Majority: Authority, Conformity, and Academic Silence in Scholarly Discourse, Preprints.org, preprint, 2025, DOI:10.20944/preprints202507.2515.v1

peer review - Editorial rejection: should I write back? - Academia Stack Exchange

Treating editorial rejections as immovable facts protects systemic bias, entrenches error, and stifles genuine innovation. Authors who believe in their work should absolutely consider a well-argued appeal instead of silently walking away.

 The “Don’t Bother Appealing” Advice Ignores Documented Bias

Editors acknowledge that >60% of submissions never reach peer review in many STEM journals, meaning a single individual’s unconscious bias can end a project’s publication path

Ignoring these patterns and telling early-career researchers “appeals are futile” effectively reinforces a system already tilted toward senior, Western, and well-cited scientists.

Desk Rejections Often Protect Mistakes, Not Quality

Reluctance to publish corrections is widespread.

the paper was desk-rejected—twice—for “insufficient importance,” while the error-laden original remained on the record.

History Rewards the Persistently Rejected

Many landmark discoveries were first rebuffed: Fermi’s weak-interaction theory, Cerenkov radiation, and graphene research all received editorial or peer-review rejections before earning Nobel prizes. Had the authors meekly accepted “odds of success indistinguishable from zero,” physics and chemistry textbooks would look very different.

• The rejection cites “out of scope” despite clear topical matches or recent similar papers (as in the Carbon case).

The Real Risk Lies in Silence

By appealing, the worst outcome is the status quo (still rejected).

By staying silent, you:

• reinforce bias against under-represented authors;

• let published errors stand unchallenged;

• limit the diversity of ideas in the literature;

• potentially sacrifice discoveries that could change your field.

That is a far greater cost than investing a few hours in a rigorous, polite appeal.

Editorial rejection letters may arrive pre-formatted, but knowledge creation should never be rubber-stamped. Open, evidence-based appeals are powerful tools to expose bias, correct the record, and give innovative work the scrutiny it deserves. The next time a “copy-pasted” desk rejection lands in your inbox, remember the data above—and consider saying, convincingly, “I respectfully disagree.”