There was a posting here last August
http://uncertaintist.wordpress.com/2011/08/22/did-peer-review-fail-at-science/
about a paper which was initially accepted at Science, a prestigious journal published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the AAAS. After the accepted paper was made available on-line in a pre-archival form, informal community “reviewing” caught technical problems in the paper which the original, formally appointed, peer reviewers had missed. Although Paola Sebastiani and her co-authors corrected their paper, they and the editors of Science didn’t reach an agreement to publish the new version of the paper.
An author’s remedy in such a case is to withdraw the paper, and seek to publish it elsewhere. The revised paper has been published at PLOS One, an on-line peer reviewed journal. The link to the paper is here:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0029848
The journal’s comments on the decision to publish this paper are here,
http://blogs.plos.org/everyone/2012/01/18/genetic-signatures-of-exceptional-longevity-revisited/
Also interesting is the reporting about the news at the AAAS ScienceNOW service,
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/01/long-life-is-still-somewhat-in-y.html
which includes a few hints that maybe peace is settling in within the community, and that the work in its present form is of high scientific and statistical quality.
