From the Telegraph:
Two of the world's leading scientific journals have come under fire from researchers for refusing to publish papers which challenge fashionable wisdom over global warming.
A British authority on natural catastrophes who disputed whether climatologists really agree that the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity, says his work was rejected by the American publication, Science, on the flimsiest of grounds.
Students and others not involved in the academic publishing system may not know how the journal rejection publication process goes, so the rest of this post is directed at them. A researcher finishes a draft of a paper and then sends it on to a peer-reviewed journal. The editor of the journal then decides if the paper is worthy of publication in their journal. He will quickly look at the subject and decide if that journal's readership would find the paper interesting. If not, then the editors send it back to the researcher, usually with suggestions of a more appropriate journal.
If the editor finds the paper to be of interest to the journal's readership, he'll send it out to several referees who then read the paper and offer critical comments back on it. If they don't find the paper interesting or if they don't find the research sound, the will usually advise the editor to reject the paper. The researcher then either shelves the project or, more likely, revises it and sends it off to another journal.
If they find the paper interesting and its research sound, they may advise the editor to request the researcher to revise and resubmit the paper. The researcher then does this, and the paper goes through a second round of review. In the papers I've published, every time I've gotten a revise and resubmit, I've had my paper accepted after the first revision. I have refereed papers that I have requested a second round of revisions and I have heard of papers that were rejected after the second round of revisions. In any case, from the launching of the project to final publication, this process may take several years. Indeed, my paper that was accepted yesterday has been in the process for several years and the main idea of the paper - a revenue sharing system designed to reward teams for spending shared revenue on improving their teams - is about 2 years old at this point.
Anyways, we'd like to think that this "market of ideas" would be a free market where papers that don't support the conventional wisdom would be as publishable as research that supports the status quo and, in my opinion, that's what we have. However, in some particular journals in some areas, the editors may have a particular bias against a particular line of thought, and won't allow papers supporting that line into their journal Apparently, this may be the case with two of the big journals that publish articles on global warming: Science and Nature.
Still, as long as their are journals that either have a different bias or don't have a bias, there will still be a free trade of ideas.
HT to Division of Labour.