Phew

I'm relieved to say that our paper on the CMIP3 ensemble and its mean has finally been accepted. The final version can be found here, though it seems that the website is not working properly (it is finally being reorganised to match reality, the institute "FRSGC" ceased to exist about 5 years ago and the division "d5" about 3 years ago IIRC). It's not hugely changed from the original and the main results are the same, but it has been improved a bit by the peer-review process. I was a bit unimpressed with how that worked this time around, actually. I already talked about the initial rejection, which was made on the basis of three overtly favourable and one hostile review. We managed to talk round the editor by showing that the rejection was based on a simple misunderstanding, at which point he conceded that we should be allowed to submit a revised version. We did that, and for the next round we had three clear acceptances (I think the paper might have only gone back to the most critical of these three, actually). The hostile reviewer, however, having had his initial complaint refuted, decided this time that our paper was too trivial to publish (using a simple argument that was not actually correct and didn't cover our main results anyway), and the editor asked for "major revision" to deal with this criticism. We complained again, on the grounds that three of four reviewers had already found it interesting enough and that any further revision was hardly likely to change the mind of the 4th (we did also show why their argument failed, though I'm not sure if the editor really believed us). And this got us upgraded to a "minor revision", and finally acceptance.

So in the end it all worked out OK, and certainly a lot more smoothly than this lengthy saga, but I can't help but think it was rather more of a struggle than it needed to be. I suspect that the editor probably knows and respects the 4th reviewer rather better than the others, but that's a bit of a guess. Incidentally, the editor is a very clever guy whose work I admire greatly (though we've not met and he probably doesn't know who I am), so perhaps that is partly why I found the process a bit disappointing. Anyway, I can now move on to the next part of the plan...