Accepting math papers that other journals reject

The Economist: Paul Lauterbur, the father of magnetic-resonance imaging, had his seminal paper rejected when he first submitted it to Nature. Peter Higgs, eponymous predictor of physics’s missing boson, faced similar trouble with Physics Letters. But Lauterbur went on to win a Nobel prize for his work, and Higgs is an odds-on favourite to get one soon. A good, rejected paper, then, is by no means an oxymoron. And that observation is the basis of Rejecta Mathematica, an open-source academic journal that recently went online. As its name suggests, the new journal publishes only papers that, like Lauterbur’s and Higgs’s, have been previously submitted to, and rejected by, others.