> Colin Butler, writing in the Journal NATURE, November 6, 1948.  Nature is often described as the world’s leading science journal. 

Nature is truly a Legend In Their Own Mind.  In reality, Nature drops the ball far more often than other self-described top-tier journals Their high-and-mighty reputation is primarily based on  an abusive and arbitrary approach to those who send them their life's work.   No wonder so many people love arXiv and its many clones for no-math, non-physics, for the contact-sport aspects of new papers, and PLOSone for publication to the masses.

Confining ourselves to only work that actually resulted in Nobel prizes, Nature bats near the bottom of the league.  Off the top of my head, in no particular order, here are a few that are "famous" in their egregiousness:

a) Lauterbur/Mansfield's Nobel Prize winning paper was rejected by Nature. He had to fight with them to get grudging acceptance.  But when he later won a Nobel, Nature then tried to take credit in promotional ads.  Lauterbur famously blew his top on several pre-print forums.  It was an epic lampoon.

b) In the 1930s, Nature rejected Cherenkov's paper, entitled "Visible Radiation Produced by Electrons..."  Physical Review accepted it.  Seeing that ultraviolet glow is the highlight of nuclear power plant tours.  

c) Also in the 30s, they rejected Yukawa's paper on “heavy quanta”, now called pions. An obscure Japanese journal published his paper, but progress in the entire area of "mesons" was hampered by this.

d) They even rejected Deisenhofer, Huber, and Michel's work on how proteins are made in photosynthesis, also Nobel-winning.

e) Stephen Hawking's initial paper on black-hole radiation was the subject of a long, drawn out fight with Nature, Hawking bitterly complained about it in one of his many books, I forget which.

f) Kerbs' Nobel-winning work on what we now call "The Kerbs Cycle" was rejected by Nature

I'll not mention work that slipped through that turned out to be fraud and fabrication, as this problem has been equally suffered by all the top-tier journals, and Nature is no better or worse in this regard.


That said, the usual process is to get an email rejecting one's submission, followed very quickly by an offer to become an unpaid, uncredited reviewer for that same journal.  I see a possible underlying cause here...

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