“Initially, it was rejected by The American Naturalist because the Subject Editor felt it was – are you ready for this? – “too novel”! Too heretical, too disturbing somehow. And I thought, well, that’s a really great compliment, but I don’t think they should reject it for that reason. So I actually wrote to the editor, Mark Rausher, and complained. Fortunately, Mark re-assigned it to a different subject editor and it eventually got accepted.”

“It took a long time to get accepted. It was rejected by Evolution the first time we sent it in, for not a very good reason. And so, we just wrote a letter back saying the reviewer is wrong because of this, this and this. And it was accepted!”

“It took us some time [to decide to submit the paper to PNAS]. The first draft was sent to Nature in 2002 and come back rejected shortly after that. In August that year, we submitted it to Science. It went out for peer review, but ended up rejected again.”

“Jens really felt that it deserved to be read by a broad audience. Nature was just the first one we thought we would try, and we got lucky. I, previously, had a pretty, harrowing experience with what was really my first first-author paper, which I first tried to publish in Proceedings of the Royal Society, and eventually published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology in 2002. The reviewer at Proceedings was absolutely scathing; absolutely destroyed the paper. His quote was, “I’ve seen more interesting patterns in slime molds”. I thought he really missed the point of the paper. This paper was about the emergence of group dynamics, and properties such as collecting memory and spatial sorting within groups. And because that was my first paper that I was really writing myself, I lost confidence after reading the review. I wrote to Simon Levin and said, I’ve got this paper that’s just been rejected, and he suggested that I send it to the Journal of Theoretical Biology because it has published some seminal work like 'Geometry of the Selfish Herd' by Hamilton. So, I sent it there and it was accepted within a week. I remember I wrote to the editor – I don’t remember who it was – and said, this was my first paper, and I haven’t received any reviews, and it would be very helpful for me to see the reviews. I didn’t get a reply, and then it was just published. So, despite the initial hammering that has become one of the most cited papers in Animal Behavior research.”

“Often it seems like my favourite papers never get published. The papers that I like the most, reviewers don’t like at all! I have a computer full of such manuscripts. There is a Finnish journal which I think is Journal of Negative Results. I have been wondering whether, perhaps, we should establish a Journal of Unpublished Results!”

“The first version was rejected from Science because a reviewer said it contradicted basic tenets of limnology and therefore had to be wrong.”

“The reasons given for rejection ranged all over the place. Some of them were ad hominem attacks; a lot of them were of the gist, “I can’t believe this result; it just is not possible.”The Nature review was, “If you accept this paper, I will never review for you again.” One was, “Has Hubbell lost his mind? His theory cannot be correct because it’s based on a false assumption.” Things like that. They were mostly incredulous and highly skeptical and completely unhelpful. I mean, like, nobody even wanted to consider the idea. It was pretty universally rejected, and it was very discouraging. With the wisdom of hindsight, I’m much more mellow about it now. And if you consider this a paradigm shift in a way, that’s exactly what you expect from true believers.”

“There are some aspects of this paper, particularly the way I displayed the data in Figures 2 and 3, which I think I intentionally oversimplified nature in a way that has always left me uneasy. (Note that there are no error bars …)”

“There is a paper I wrote about the difficulty of publishing the original paper, which was written up in a book on Tropical Forest Ecology edited by Walt Carson and Stephen Schnitzer. And it talks about some of the ugliness, the hate mail, I got from reviewers. I have a file of it; it’s buried somewhere in a file cabinet. When I moved to California, I kept them all, because it was pretty amazing. Did you know that I’m the anti-Christ of Ecology? Things like that. I tried to publish the Neutral Theory idea everywhere. [...] The kind of sweet irony is that all of the journals that rejected the original paper, started publishing on Neutral Theory all at about the same time, you know, Nature, Science, PNAS, American Naturalist. They all did it.”

“There was something I wanted to do, but didn’t do, that would have been a clincher. That was whole island experiments, in which we removed leaf-cutter ants from some, rodents from some, and both ants and rodents from others. And, of course, there would have been untreated controls. We were starting to implement these experiments at the end of the study, but then two things happened, both beyond our control. First, there was a 3-year drought that brought the water level in Lago Guri down 26 meters. Yes, that’s 26 meters. This exposed many sq.km. of lake bed and effectively connected all the experimental islands to each other and the mainland. The last year we were there – 2003 – we found 6 different predator species on islands where we had not previously seen any predators at all, over a 13-year time span. This was convincing evidence that, in fact, the islands were predator-free during the main period of our research. Second, Hugo Chavez came in as President of Venezuela in 1999 and was cracking down on foreigners, especially Americans. There was no way we could have continued the project under his government.”

“This came about completely by chance. I had just finished my PhD, a study of the behaviour of a little bird, the pied wagtail. My pied wagtails defended territories along a river, and I noticed that every so often, a territory owner would leave his territory to feed elsewhere, particularly on days when there wasn’t much food on the territory. But periodically throughout the day, he would keep coming back to check if there was anyone intruding on his territory, and if there was, he would chase them off. I was very interested to know why he was doing this. I wondered if he was trying to prevent any newcomer spending sufficient time on the territory that it would get to learn its characteristics and, in effect, think this is a jolly nice place to live. If the owner came back periodically and chased off a newcomer before it had time to learn about the territory, it would be easier to get rid of him. To test this idea, I wanted to catch the owner and keep him away for a sufficient length of time for a newcomer to learn the characteristics of the territory, then put the original owner back and ask if he would then find it harder to win back the territory. I tried for a winter and failed completely simply because the birds were too hard to catch. I was then living in a little chalet in Wytham Woods, on the edge of Oxford, where David Lack started his famous studies of the great tit. I had a spare summer because I had just finished my thesis and my next job didn’t start till the autumn. This was 1976, so 40 years ago, and it was romantic living up in the woods. Every day was sunny which was highly unusual for England. People still remember that glorious summer. I think we had a three month spell with cloudless skies and the wood was full of butterflies. And I just noticed some butterflies doing little spiral flights in sunny patches, and I thought, well, that looks like territory defence. Maybe I can do the experiments on them instead of the wagtails because butterflies would be much easier to catch. [...] The whole thing came through natural history curiosity and serendipity, I guess.”

“We finished the paper and submitted it to Nature. The editor rejected it without review because of “insufficient interest to researchers in a broad range of other disciplines”. Therefore we promptly reformatted the manuscript and submitted it to Science. Here it had a completely different reception. The manuscript was sent out for review, and all three reviewers plus editor were highly enthusiastic about it. The paper was accepted with some minor changes at the end of May and published six weeks later.”

“We first submitted the paper to Nature but it was rejected, so we rewrote the paper for Animal Behaviour. Nature has a very strict word limit, so the first draft of the paper for Nature was a lot less expansive than the Animal Behaviour version.”

“We submitted it to Nature first. We got rejected, we appealed, and the appeal was accepted. But then it got rejected again. Then it also got rejected at Science, the first time. But Mark already had a name for himself, and so the editor at Science actually called him up and said: ‘Why should we publish this?’ I think Mark did a very good PR job on it. Despite all this, I think this paper probably had a smoother ride than many of my other papers.”

“We submitted it to Science first, and it didn’t go out for review”

“We thought it was newsworthy and decided to shoot for the top journals. We, actually, sent it to Nature first, where it was rejected without review.”

“When I was a graduate student, papers in The American Naturalist were often revered. I mean, many of the synthetic papers in American Naturalist have had a major and lasting impact. And to me this was, of anything I’d ever written, a perfect fit for The American Naturalist. It combined ecology and evolution, and it was synthetic. And so, I submitted it first to The American Naturalist, and it was read by three editors, and they didn’t send it for review. They felt that it didn’t really say anything that they hadn’t already thought about. And so - I can only speculate - but it made me wonder if sometimes the real experts on a topic are necessarily the best to evaluate whether something synthetic is going to be useful. I don’t doubt that they had thought about things that way, but until somebody writes it down, in a way that that can be broadly diffused, then just because it’s in somebody’s mind, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be published. And so that was quite disappointing, I must say. And then I submitted a proposal to Ecology Letters; it must have been one of their Concepts & Syntheses papers. The proposal was accepted, which just means that they will allow you to submit a full manuscript, but then when I submitted the full manuscript - I can’t remember if I did a proposal or if I just went straight to the manuscript - either way, it was the same thing, where one, maybe a couple of editors, read it and they just didn’t think it was novel enough. Like the perspective wasn’t new; they’d also thought about things that way. The wording was very different, but the thrust of the rejections were more or less the same: these particular editors had already thought about things that way and so it didn’t strike them as pushing things forward enough, or novel enough. In going through old files while checking this transcript, I actually realized that a proposal to Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics was also rejected. It was a few pages, not a whole manuscript, and I don’t have any record of the rejection itself, just a memory. But I have the proposal itself and it was definitely submitted and rejected.”

“Wherever I showed that result it was just dismissed. People felt it just cannot be true; it had to be wrong. I even had a friendly review where the reviewer said in the margin: my BS meter is ticking. Near the results section he had noted in the margin: my BS metre has exploded. There were no more comments after that. I wasn’t that good in English and so I asked Gary what BS means. He told me it was the "bullshit metre". This was the attitude to my result. Nobody believed it. This is actually why I ended up doing the Ecography paper. ”

“You know, at the beginning I was not sure exactly what I was going to find. I just knew I needed to be systematic, be quantitative. I knew I wanted to study food sharing but I didn’t know how often I would see it, so it was done with some level of hope. The information from these focal animal samples was mainly used in a subsequent paper where I report on social grooming. The food-sharing was so infrequent that I recorded it whenever I saw it. It was so rare that if I had done it only on focal animals I would have had no data. In fact, in the first six months, I think I had seen it only a couple of times. At that point I was starting to think that the whole project was doomed. I think part of the issue was that – and this is not mentioned in any paper –in order to see the animals and identify them, I used coloured reflecting bands – bird bands, basically – on the wings of the bats. And to see the bands inside the tree I had to shine lights on them. Initially, the bats would always hide from the lights and so I couldn’t make any observations. In order to overcome that, I would, every single day, take a miner light into the tree and shine it on the bats continuously. These would last for 12 hours with rechargeable batteries, and the bats had nowhere to go, so in some time they got habituated to the lights. I could confirm this with a night vision scope which I could use with infra-red light. Infra-red light is invisible to bats. So when I compared their behaviour with the night vision scope and with the lights I couldn’t tell any difference. But it took months.”

“You know, my most favourite paper was rejected so many times I gave up on it. It hasn’t been published. I had used a method called angular statistics, on predator-prey cycles, and was able to show that they really weren’t cycles. I thought it was neat and nobody had ever done that before. But it’s been rejected and rejected and rejected. So my favourite paper is only mine!”