The McSweeney’s of math
McSweeney’s originally published works rejected by other magazines. Rejecta Mathematica hopes to do the same for math journals.
The volume starts with a letter from the editors that answers important questions like “Is it a joke?” (No.) and “Why are you doing it?” (Several paragraphs of reasons.)
They intend to publish minor results, results based on questionable assumptions and open letters among other things. The notion is that these works often contain valuable insights that might be more broadly applicable or offer warnings about fruitless paths. They admit that such a project wouldn’t be feasible in a pre-internet era.
I can certainly see this strategy being successful in other fields; plenty of “null results” probably get needlessly reproduced. On the other hand, it may be the case that the relatively more expensive experiments done by physicists or biologists would be more harshly treated by university administrations.
The journal has no peer review process — they rely on the peer review of the journals from which their papers were first rejected. Each paper has an open letter explaining why it was rejected and why it was ultimately accepted.
Many of these letters do in fact complain about being rejected in the first place. Editors not actually reading papers is a big complaint. Worries are abound. One author frets: “Maybe I used too many exclamation marks…Please tell me, sirs, what to change” or a different author begs “How about insights that may open some closed doors?” I’ll leave it to others to judge whether the papers published are in fact useful, but many of them sound interesting at least.
I fear that soon we can expect them to continue down the McSweeney’s path. I hear issue two will contain only unsuccessful proofs of Fermat’s last theorem rendered as pop song lyrics and a comb.
