The "research" is at times risible. Key experimental results appeared suddenly in a manuscript version upon which lab members were given a couple of hours to comment before submission to Nature.

"When the students asked Dias about the stunning new data, they say, he told them he had taken all the resistance and magnetic-susceptibility data before coming to Rochester."

Just nonchalantly sitting on proof of room-temperature superconductivity for a few years, as one does. /2

For the first paper, Nature engaged three referees and there were three rounds of review. One referee was strongly positive, the other two did not support publication. Nature went ahead anyway.

I can't think of a previous black on white example where Nature have admitted allowing impact to override quality, although that's always been the tacit implication of their editorial policy. And this is exactly the result they risk with that policy. /4

@BorisBarbour

For as long as I can remember, they've always made it quite explicit, that their editors reign supreme and reviewers only advise them - and that this goes in bnoth directions.

In the words of now infamous Declan Butler, "peer-review light": the non-peers are making the main decisions and the peers are relegated to the back-seats.

@brembs @BorisBarbour "For as long as I can remember, they've always made it quite explicit, that their editors reign supreme and reviewers only advise them - and that this goes in bnoth directions."

Isn't that how journals started, and how they're supposed to function? The role of reviewers is to advise the editor, not be the editor and make decisions for the journal.

If editors aren't supposed to make their own judgement calls, why have trained scientist experts be editors at all?

@MarkHanson @BorisBarbour

For me, editors know the topic of their journal and decide if the topic fits. Once peer-review has started, editors are just mediators between reviewers and authors - and not prophets who divine the future impact of research.