Springer Respond!
Recently, an article appeared in Naturwissenschaften, with the title ‘Deep Diving Dinosaurs’, with zero content about dinosaurs and being instead about their distant relatives, the ichthyosaurs. Naturally, being a miffed Brit, I decided to write a letter to the journal’s publisher, Springer.
Here’s the mighty response from one of their Editorial Directors:
Thank you Dr. Tennant,
much appreciated. We are looking into it.
Paul Roos
What did you expect? A speech about how they’re going to reform and streamline the publication pipeline? Nah, I expect this means something more along the lines of..
I’m not sure either how he got confused between ‘Policy Intern’ and ‘Dr’, as I certainly haven’t finished or even started a PhD yet. Not sure whether to facedesk at the irony of him getting my title wrong.
Perhaps nothing was achieved through this. But perhaps something was. On the off chance that someone at Springer now thinks, “You know what, we have a responsibility to publish scientifically rigorous articles, so perhaps we should be a little more careful during our review/editorial processes in future”, then great success! For the sake of science, if you spot a mistake like this in future, don’t let it just fester in the system. Do something about it – it takes 5 minutes to write a letter, and the worst that can happen is you won’t get a response. If you can get someone with a bit of clout (like a Professor) to co-sign too, then even better. As John Hutchinson commented though, if you do chose to write a letter, keep it short, sweet, and diplomatic. You’re much more likely to get somewhere that way.
Word.
You better get used to the Dr thing.
If I had a pound for all the emails addressing me as ‘Dr.’ I’d be rather wealthy; after ~3yrs of PhD it’s pretty routine to me now. But it’s still hilarious every time and a good way of distinguishing how much they bothered to read your email. Most of the time it’s just spam harvesting email addresses from published papers, but the odd human errors do appear as well.
Best of luck Dr Tennant 😉
And I thought it was just me who was the “doctor” here………… *cough*
Your test message propagated successfully to the offshore depths of the internet.
And I get the “Doctor” thing from time to time too, and I’ve never even considered Piling it Higher and Deeper.
Next time, I’m going to respond with red text saying “Dr? Don’t you mean Saint Lord Professor Jon, Esquire. Tut”