I misconstrued the review history of the paper discussed in the last post: my apologies

Two days ago, I wrote about what seemed to be an instance of peer review gone very wrong. I’ve now heard from two of the four authors of the paper and from the reviewer in question — both by email, and in comments on the original post — and it’s apparent that I misinterpreted the situation. When the lead author’s tweet mentioned “pushing it through eight rounds of review”, I took this at face value as meaning eight rounds at the same journal with the same reviewers — whereas in fact the reviewer in question reviewed only four drafts. (That still seems like too many to me, but clearly it’s not as ludicrous as the situation as I misread it.) In this light, my assumption that the reviewer was being obstructive was not warranted.

I have decided to retract that article and I offer my apologies to the reviewer, Dave Grossnickle, who approached me very politely off-list to offer the corrections that you can now read in his comment.