In publishing, the quality of an
academic journal is often gauged by how
exclusive it is. Thus the higher the
rejection rate of that journal (meaning, the more submitted
papers it snootily declines to publish as falling below its lofty standards), the better of a journal it must be. It thusly follows that the finest journal in the world is the
Journal of Universal Rejection, which rejects
every single paper submitted to it, and so, is never actually able to put out an
issue. If an
author submits a piece to the
Journal of Universal Rejection, their
editors will happily
review at and reject it straight off.
Wired magazine
offers more details of the benefits of submitting to this journal, including the fact that they don't care whether you've simultaneously submitted your work elsewhere, and their return rate is blindingly fast compared to the typical months-long slog for such publication efforts. The one lacking element in this scheme is a
rating on the reviewer's
quality scale, which one would imagine would go from "absolutely unpublishable
garbage" to "just
barely below our standards," for which the latter sort of rating would be quite a
feather in the author's cap indeed!!
Incidentally, the counterpoint to the
Journal of Universal Rejection, on a Cosmic scale, is....
Everything2 -- which has a freakin'
button marked "
Publish."