| 7:43p |
Dear Prof. Toen,
I received your message back in February. Unfortunately, I am not really available as a reviewer at this time, being presently unemployed and living off my savings without income while studying Hebrew in an ulpan as a new repatriant in Haifa. Whatever limited resources of time and energy I still have, go to finishing my own research projects as fast as possible. A review I promised to write back in February 2014, which was one month before I concluded that I do not want to stay in Moscow anymore in light of the political developments in Russia and went to emigration, was never written and me agreeing to write it in the first place only caused a year-long delay. I do not want to repeat this kind of experience.
Besides, I have to admit that I have no idea what the "standards for high level journals" might consist in. Not only I have no idea how high is the presumed high level of JEMS or any other journal as compared to whatever other journals, but also the very concept of high levels of the present-day mathematics research journals is not clear to me. It is not supposed to be, as indeed, my own level as a researcher is demonstrably not high enough to judge. With a rare exception of a paper written jointly with a mathematician much more famous than me, I was never able to get my own papers accepted in "high level journals".
If anyone is interested in my personal opinion, it is that the journal's "high levels" nowadays consist in accepting mediocre papers and rejecting really good ones. The less selective journals may be publishing a mixture of bad and good papers; the more selective ones are more reliable in the sense of putting out a homogeneous stream of papers that are neither bad nor good. As I find it too boring and pointless to write mediocre papers myself, I am consequently not qualified to issue judgements on the matters of correspondence of papers written by other people to the accepted levels of mediocrity.
Anyway, certainly this point of view of mine only reflects my own inadequacy. There are many people who know better than this. Let them who are getting published by high level journals decide who and what else should be printed there. My own lack of qualifications in this respect has been convincingly confirmed by no one other than yourself. Back in Septemer 2011, acting as an editor of Advances in Mathematics, you decided to reject my paper on Artin-Tate motivic sheaves with finite coefficients based on a referee's report claiming it to be "clear and original, but not yet ready for publication in Advances in Mathematics".
I do not know what these kind of pronouncements are supposed to mean, or how people arrive to [the] point when they are prepared to make them. I have not, and am not.
Best regards,
Leonid Positselski |