Journal of Universal Rejection
February 4, 2011 § 3 Comments
Via Pondering Blather, here is the ultimate platonic ideal of all high-profile journals: the Journal of Universal Rejection. No more wondering whether your paper will be accepted; it won’t be. The submission/acceptance ratio is even higher than that at Nature and Science; that makes it more prestigious, right? The format is highly flexible, too, and there are no page charges.
Journal issues are fully accessible on-line immediately after publication.
It Takes 30 
I like this journal. It could have only been invented by mathematicians. However, as a mild criticism: Becky’s suggested ratio of submission/acceptance is troublesome since the denominator is zero. Only when the number of submissions converge to zero this quotient becomes interesting in a mathematical sense: lim 0/0 might be anything depending on the mathematical nature of the numerator and denominator. So, eventually this quotient might be even lower than that of Nature, Science or even the Bavarian Journal of Theoretical Humor.
I was concerned about this too, so I sent in the following submission:
This is a submission to the Journal of Universal Rejection. I am submitting it so that I can confidently claim that there has been at least one submission to the Journal, since a submission/acceptance rate of 0/0 is challenging for non-mathematicians to contemplate and/or write about. Thank you very much for your consideration and eventual rejection.
— Rebecca Ward
and received the following reply:
Dear Rebecca,
Thanks again for your submission to the Journal of Universal Rejection. You needn’t have worried about us receiving submissions; in the last two weeks we have gotten over 250 submissions. You may rest assured that our acceptance rate stands at 0%.
On that note, I must let you know that we cannot accept your submission for publication in our Journal.
Best regards,
Caleb
This is a wonderful example of destroy-a-theory-with-one-click-of-your-mouse…too bad