© ISTOCK.COM/WRAGGIn July 2012, while attending the 12th International Coral Reef Symposium in Cairns, Australia, Emily Darling received a heart-wrenching e-mail: Ecology Letters had rejected her paper on coral life histories. She was shocked. The paper had already gone through one very positive round of reviews, and Darling, then in the final months of her PhD program at Simon Fraser University outside Vancouver, Canada, had resubmitted it with the requested changes. Just the day before, a senior colleague at a cocktail hour had revealed to her that he was one of the reviewers and that he had recommended that the journal publish her paper. Another reviewer had clearly disagreed.
“It felt like the worst place in the world that I ever could have got the rejection,” says Darling, who received the e-mail in a conference room full of her peers. “I’m looking around at this amphitheater of people and saying, ‘Who did it?’ It sort of personalized the rejection experience.”
But Darling’s advisor, Isabelle Côté, wasn’t about to take the rejection without a fight. The pair tracked down the paper’s editor, who was also at the conference, and learned that the negative reviewer had been added in the second round because two first-round reviewers had been unavailable. Darling and Côté asked the editor if he would consider a letter rebutting the negative reviewer’s criticisms, then tracked down the positive reviewer Darling had met, who ...
