Dead end. At the moment we are writing these lines, having obtained Lequeux's agreement, we have attempted to re-establish contact with his referee. Indeed, it does not seem acceptable to us that a journal could reject an article after eleven months of intensive dialogue, without providing a scientific justification for such rejection.
We will of course report on the developments of this matter on our website, hoping fervently that a resolution can be found.
In the following article, as originally desired by the referee, we first explored the implications of a universe model involving two interacting populations, such that:
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Two matter particles attract each other according to Newton's law.
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Two particles from the second population (here called "repulsive dark matter") also attract each other according to Newton's law.
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Two particles belonging to different populations repel each other according to "anti-Newton."
We then construct a model of galaxy confinement by a surrounding environment of repulsive dark matter (Section 2). This allows us to recover the rotation curve (Figure 4). We then briefly discuss the geometric context (Section 3). The universe is presented as a two-sheeted covering of a skeleton manifold. We adopt a system of field equations (3) + (4), which has the advantage of allowing, during the radiation phase, a smooth connection with the standard model. This was in fact the provisional solution chosen by the referee in one of his letters. There exists another way to handle this radiation phase while preserving the same form:
but the referee had wished for this to be the subject of a separate article (cited in J. Lequeux's letter of December 1, 1997: "... the radiative era").
The work then highlights the different evolutions of the two universes (Figure 5), with consequences for interpreting measurements of the Hubble constant in terms of the age of the universe. Then, the effect of negative lensing (inverse gravitational lensing) is invoked again, to show that this model can also be consistent with observations.
Following our last telephone conversation with James Lequeux, editor of the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, it had been agreed that I would send a letter to his anonymous referee, which he would forward. I therefore sent a letter, with two possible outcomes:
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Either the referee would accept that I submit to him privately, outside the A&A process, a text composed from the sections of the work I had previously submitted and which he had, in principle, approved (this is the text of the article below, cautiously renamed "Repulsive dark matter").
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Or he would confirm his agreement with Lequeux's final rejection decision; in that case, I asked him kindly to send me his final report, justifying this position after ten months of exchanges, sixty questions, and seven successive versions.
"Letter to Mr. J. Lequeux, dated March 11, 1998:
Dear Colleague,
As agreed, I sent you, by letter dated January 12, 1998, a letter addressed to the referee you had chosen, and you promised to forward it to him. To date (two months have passed), I have received no reply from him.
I recall that this step followed ten months of exchanges, from February to November 1997, during which your referee successively posed sixty questions, in batches of about a dozen each, resulting in seven successive revisions. Personally, I have seen in these exchanges—evidenced by the file itself—only a collaborative, warm, and constructive effort. I recall that this sentiment appears in both his first and final letter: "I like the basic idea." I was therefore greatly surprised by your abrupt decision to reject the manuscript "definitively and irrevocably" in December 1997, especially since I had the impression that we were converging toward a publishable text.
In my letter to your referee, I made two proposals:
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Either he would agree to examine, on a private basis outside the A&A process, a text entitled "Repulsive dark matter," which I offered to send him, containing the elements I believed he had approved during our ten-month exchange.
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Or he would confirm that he agreed with your decision to reject (a decision I have not seen expressed anywhere in his replies, including his last one, where he reiterated "I like the basic idea"). In that case, I asked him kindly to send me the list of scientific arguments justifying his rejection.
I cannot conceive that a scientific journal editor could make a final, irreversible decision to reject a manuscript simply because discussions between authors and referee "have lasted too long." This would be equivalent to ending a chess game because the number of moves exceeds some arbitrary "norm." The real issue, however, is not whether the discussion drags on, but how it evolves.
It is not our fault that the referee, showing clearly insatiable curiosity about this approach, asked us, starting from an initial manuscript of 22 pages:
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A complete cosmological model.
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Then, clarifications regarding its radiation phase.
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A comparison with other authors’ work (Foot, Volkas, Mohapatra, and Berezhiani, Phys Rev 1995).
thus literally expanding the manuscript (to 90 pages), at which point it had been considered to split it into parts.
I know that journals are, in principle, independent structures, free to pass the ball back and forth, which they certainly do, leaving authors to be shuttled from one journal to another for years without proper review, until they return to square one (your suggestion).
I believe your decision, as well as the referee's current silence, given the importance and duration of the preceding exchanges, constitutes a breach of our professional ethics.
Sincerely yours,
J.P. Petit