For the overwhelming majority of professional scholarly work, rejection should be the very, very last resort and a marker of communication failure:
"While rejections are expected and often unavoidable, the way decisions are communicated has significant implications for author trust and engagement. Clear, respectful and transparent communication can transform a rejection into a learning opportunity.
"
@brembs These days I'm inclined to review papers as the CRAN team does with R software packages. You just list the obvious mistakes and return it to sender. Fix and try again.
Even this I think is a courtesy - as the rules should be clear (and here some problems might rest - that the expected minimum standards aren't well defined and variable).
I guess there are huge discipinary differences? Disciplines that have seen a lot of influx in recent years seem to be more affected? If that were so, my use of "professional" would be warranted 😆
Absolutely!
Which is precisely why I argue that rejections, in principle, ought to hardly/not exist, as long as everyone just did behave professionally and did their effing job properly 😇
Björn Brembs
Koen Hufkens, PhD