Chapter 350 - 292: Your Journal’s Review Process Lacks Rigor, I Decline to Submit

Chapter 350: Chapter 292: Your Journal’s Review Process Lacks Rigor, I Decline to Submit

A public invitation to submit!

The moment this news was posted, the entire inverse problems community exploded.

Normally, when a journal invited a submission, the editor-in-chief would send a private email, and the matter would be settled through personal correspondence.

The academic world is all about saving face. A public invitation was equivalent to putting both parties on a stage for everyone to judge—something virtually unheard of in the past.

But this time, *Inverse Problems* chose to do it publicly.

The reason wasn’t hard to guess.

The retraction of Engelhardt’s paper had already dealt a significant blow to the journal’s credibility.

If they had extended a private invitation at a time like this, even if it were accepted, the outside world would just assume the journal was making some under-the-table deal to fix the situation.

Only a public invitation was equivalent to the editorial board declaring something to the entire academic community:

"Li Dong’s criterion is solid."

"We were wrong, but we will make it right!"

That was the real weight behind this announcement.

And as soon as it came out, even those few senior figures who had been stubbornly holding their ground immediately went silent.

In an instant, the entire field of inverse problems began to collectively adopt Li Dong’s set of criteria.

Several universities in the country hastily added his "Comment" to the supplementary reading list for their fall semester graduate courses on inverse problems.

Before the next week even started, a professor was already grumbling in a group chat.

"I have to redo my entire lecture notes."

It was as if the entire inverse problem modeling community had suddenly been given a brand-new yardstick.

The Li Criterion.

It was exactly the same as when Gikhmanov’s framework first appeared...

At that moment, whoever held this yardstick had the confidence to say, "My model is clean."

And everyone—whether in China or abroad, inside the field or out, just watching the drama or working on applications—was waiting for one thing.

When would Li Dong submit his paper?

After all, the journal had made a public invitation. Logically, whether as a show of good faith to the academic community or to pad his own impact factor, Li Dong had no reason to refuse.

Moreover, this was a direct invitation from *Inverse Problems*, with a promise of immediate acceptance.

If it were anyone else, they probably would have stayed up all night converting their draft into submission format.

The discussion was also raging on various academic forums.

"If this gets published, Li Dong’s impact factor will shoot up and leave everyone else half a galaxy behind."

"You think he cares about a little impact factor? Is that what he’s lacking right now? The universality of Langlands, the Li Conjecture... which one of those isn’t already cited by a ton of people?"

"So what do you think, will he submit to *Inverse Problems* or not? Or will he submit to another journal?"

"I think he’ll submit to *Inverse Problems*. It’s the most authoritative top journal in the field, after all."

"I think so too..."

...

The day after the public invitation was posted, Li Dong replied.

Just one line.

"Your journal’s peer review process is not rigorous. I will not be submitting."

The entire inverse problems community fell into a collective silence.

Then erupted in a frenzy of shrieks far louder than when the original invitation was announced.

"???"

"Holy shit???"

"You can actually publicly refuse a public invitation?"

"I’m just an onlooker here for the drama, and my hand was shaking for three seconds after I read that line."

"Help, I can’t handle this atmosphere."

"You don’t think Torres just fainted from rage, do you?"

The comments below piled up to over three hundred.

And as the situation developed into the next day, something even more outrageous happened.

Two other long-standing inverse problems journals, which were considered on par with *Inverse Problems*, sent private invitations to Yan University, one right after the other.

Proper and respectful, the editors-in-chief personally signed three-page-long letters of invitation and had them delivered by an old acquaintance at the Yan University School of Mathematics.

Once bitten, twice shy.

No one wanted to be the star of a repeat performance of that public rejection.

As for *Inverse Problems*...

The editorial board still hadn’t issued a second response.

Perhaps they were still processing it.

Or perhaps...

They really didn’t have a comeback.

...

And at the center of it all was Li Dong.

He paid no attention to the reactions from the outside world.

When he posted that one-line reply, he was buried in work in his research group’s seminar room.

Lately, the entire group’s morale had been exceptionally high.

There was just one reason.

Fu Chen’s paper had been formally submitted to *Compositio Mathematica*.

Once this news spread, the PhD students of the Langlands Capping Research Group were all fired up, as if they’d been shot full of adrenaline.

Their junior was already holding a knife to *Compositio*’s neck.

’How can we, his seniors, just pretend we don’t see that?’

The first one to crack was Fu Chen’s senior, Fang Yun.

She had been stuck on a minor proposition about Selmer group reduction for nearly two months and was originally planning to set that section aside and tackle a different direction.

But when the news of Fu Chen’s submission came out, she spread that entire Chapter back out on her desk that night, grinding away at it from one in the morning until six.

She managed to force her way two full steps down a reduction path she had previously suspected was a dead end.

And Zhao Xu, the usually Zen-like second-year PhD student, went so far as to stick a piece of A4 paper to his workstation. On it were four words.

"No top journal, no shaving."

The others in the seminar room gathered around the paper and laughed for a good while.

The next day, three more people posted similar resolutions at their own workstations.

However, this lighthearted atmosphere didn’t last long.

When the sense of urgency from being "schooled by their junior" truly transformed into action, the group’s dynamic rapidly shifted from isolated, individual struggles to a near-frenzied state of collective brainstorming.

To crack the tough nuts within the Langlands Program, one person pulling their hair out at their desk clearly wasn’t going to be enough.