A rant that won’t make sense outside of academia (and possibly outside of my academic field), but here we go.
Peer review involves rejection, right? Now, sometimes reviewers are dicks, we all know this, but sometimes there’re flaws in your paper (admit it: often you know about those flaws even when you submit it, and you’re just banking on folks not noticing or caring), sometimes the paper isn’t the right fit for the journal, sometimes it would be a good fit but the timing’s wrong, sometimes your cover letter’s bad or you wrote a really shitty response to reviewers or one of your co-authors has been banned from the journal or who knows, ya know?
I’m an editor for a decent journal, and when I write final rejections, I’m rarely saying “this paper is irredeemable” -- I’m saying “this paper would be better served elsewhere”. (Also sometimes I write rejections that aren’t final rejections but basically boil down to “the list of things you’d have to do in order for me to reconsider is so absurd that I really think you should look elsewhere, but, hey, you jump through these hoops, I’ll totally look at this again”, the absurdity of which probably tells you all you need to know about this process.)
Also, the senior author can appeal rejections. Not every junior author knows this, but every senior author does.
There’s a senior person in my field with a large Twitter following who keeps taking to Twitter to complain about...perfectly reasonable reviewer and editor comments that he gets. Like, perfectly reasonable. But, no, these comments criticising his perfect paper which is obviously an ideal fit for every journal, so they must be grossly unfair. And if someone’s complaining that much about a rejection, a rejection which they can appeal, it’s either because their appeal was denied (i.e. at least one more editor took a look and backed up the original editor) or because the authors haven’t bothered to appeal (in which case, attention-seeking, much?).
Reviewers are often junior. Editors are more rarely junior -- I’m a bit of an exception -- but this person is super senior, so even a reasonably established person (i.e. your standard editor) will be junior to this person. It’s stressful enough to imagine how the authors will take your comments; seeing these (perfectly reasonable!) comments excoriated in public must be awful.
We all get papers rejected. Like, constantly. We all get bad (’bad’) reviews. Like, constantly. We all learn to deal, because it is part of our job. We don’t mock our peers in public.
