Keith S. Taber
Dear Dr. Prof. Tambara Federico
Thank you for sending me your manuscript reporting your "revolutionary" paper
offering your
"own comprehensive, mass-related physical-mathematical Research Study, proposing new scientific data and formulas [sic] with a view to making it possible to unify the four universal interaction fields…, which as a matter of fact cover all possible physical as well as scientific-mathematical aspects and domains of reality itself…"
and incorporating your "FOUR REMARKABLE CONCLUSIVE THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS".
You ask that I (and the others among the "500 SCIENTIFIC ADDRESSEES" to whom you sent the paper) "will kindly agree to publish" your "Research Study in Your worldwide famous scientific Reviews and / or Journals as soon as possible". I assume you have contacted me, inter alia, seeking publication in Chemistry Education Research and Practice?
I must decline your request, on several grounds.
Your paper does not seen to be within the scope of the journal. That may seem odd when you propose a TOE (Theory of Everything). I am certainly open to the argument that in principle all academic fields could be reduced to fundamental physics, but not that this is always sensible. So for example in chemistry we have concepts such as acidity, resonance, hyperconjugation, oxidation, and so forth. These are probably, in principle, capable of being redescribed in terms of fundamental physics – but any such description is likely to be too cumbersome to be of practical value in chemistry. We have these specifically chemical concepts because the complexity of the phenomena leads to emergent properties that are most usefully considered at the level of chemistry, not physics.
How much more so the concepts related to teaching and learning chemistry! Perhaps pedagogy could (again, in principle) be reduced to physics – but that would be little more than an impressive technical achievement of no practical value. Sadly, a theory of everything tells us very little of value about most things.
Secondly, the journal has peer review processes that need to be followed, and editorial fiat is not used to publish a paper without following these processes. You may well have made major breakthroughs in this fundamental area of science, but science is communal, and your work has no status in the field until other experts have critiqued and evaluated it.
So, thirdly, any submission needs to be made through the journal's on-line review system, allowing proper editorial screening and then – should it be considered suitable (which it would not in this case, see above) allowing it to be sent to review.
However, submitting a manuscript for formal review requires you to make a number of declarations. One of these is that the manuscript you wish to be considered is not published, under review or consideration, or has been submitted to, any other journal. As you have adopted a 'scatter gun' approach to submitting your work, you would need to wait until you have received formal notification that the other 499 scholarly outlets approached are declining your manuscript before you could make a formal submission.
As you are concerned that unless your work is published it may be plagiarised, I suggest you deposit your paper in one of the many repositories now available for posting unpublished documents. This will make your work available and will demonstrate your priority in anything that may later be judged (in peer review) by experts in the field as novelty in your work.
First published 12th March 2017 at http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/kst24/
