Journal unwittingly prints rejected paper, as ad - The Scientist

"I don't know where he gets this idea that he gets to publish anything he wants in the journal of his choice," Brandt-Rauf said. "If that were true, I'd publish all of my pieces in Nature and Science."

Brandt-Rauf noted that he normally reviews advertisements before they are published, but could not in this instance because Egilman's paper replaced another ad that was cancelled at the last minute. If he had, he would have removed the ad.

Heh.

Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, said he had never heard of a researcher who published a paper as an ad in the journal that rejected it. He told The Scientist the incident raises a number of issues, such as only the "haves" being able to publish their work.

Where do you put an ad on your c.v.?

But getting back to the equity, forget the equity - would a system that required payment to be published be efficient in terms of signaling the highest quality papers? What about the current system where some journals charge a steep fee to be reviewed and give no refund if you are rejected -- that presumably has merit (you wouldn't pay unless your paper had a reasonably good chance of being accepted as good quality).

Finally, we've always had vanity press books and presses that masquarade as non-vanity but aren't much different. At least using advertising to pay for publication is transparent.