The initial decision by the journal was appealed by the authors who felt that Reviewer #3 delivered an unfair review. After a delay of several weeks, the paper was rejected again without a second review. By the time this paper was finally accepted (by eLife), two other papers on the same topic had been published.

Our unfortunate obsession with Nature...

A competing story with similar results on a related IRES structure was published in Cell around the same time. This may highlight how arbitrary the decisions made by Nature editors really are. Our paper was submitted to Nature before the competing paper was submitted to Cell. In the light of this, comments by Reviewer #3 deserve special attention.

Rejected without review at Science, published more than a year later in Cell (155:881-893) after rejections at Nature and Neuron.

Sending the paper to NSMB after it was rejected at Nature does not seem to be a good strategy. After the paper was published, it received an outstanding endorsement: After a talk about these results, a colleague asked where this was published. When he heard that it came out in PNAS after it was rejected by Nature and NSMB, he said that this story is so good that it does not matter where it was published! We completely agree with this, including the implied statement about papers published in Nature, Science and Cell. The paper also has been highlighted twice in Faculty of 1000.