What a remarkable story, Stephen. I cannot match it, but can provide a less complicated story about how I was almost ripped off too. After having published a research report about an infrequently studied survival behavior in wild male house mice and deer mice, I attempted a replication using wild female house mice and deer mice. The results were surprising, exactly the opposite of what I had earlier observed with the males. I wrote up another research report and sent it off for review. The editor responded VERY quickly, rejecting the manuscript without, he said, sending it off for review. He said it was too similar to research that I had already published. Thinking that he must have missed the MAJOR point that the results were significant in the opposite direction of what they had been in the earlier research involving female mice, I pointed this out to him and reminded that I also provided an (a posteriori) explanation of this in terms of species differences in behavioral sexual dimorphism. That angered the editor, who wrote back that the manuscript was rejected because "the data were too easy to collect." Honest, that is what he said -- not that the results were of no scientific importance, rather that I had found an easy way to gather potentially interesting data. Shortly thereafter I received from two of this editors' colleagues at a university that will remain unnamed (it is located in New England) requests for reprints of my earlier research. This immediately suggested to me that these &*^%$s intended to steal my easy method of gathering data and use it themselves to produce publishable research. You can be sure that I hurriedly sent off my manuscript to another journal where I was (correctly) quite confident that it would be published with little lag. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Karl L. Wuensch, Department of Psychology, East Carolina University, Greenville NC 27858-4353 Voice: 252-328-4102 Fax: 252-328-6283 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://core.ecu.edu/psyc/wuenschk/klw.htm
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