Ribosome•RelA structures reveal the mechanism of stringent response activation

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. This goes to show that 1) sending papers to vanity journals (such as Cell) runs a higher than average risk to get an unreasonable review, 2) editors at these journals often cannot properly judge the merit of manuscripts and reviews and 3) time wasted while waiting for a decision might be used by someone else to publish a competing manuscript.