Case Studies

ICSAC exists because the existing system fails in patterns. This page documents those patterns case by case: what happened, what the curation trail looks like, and where the failure was structural rather than accidental. Every case study is sourced — rejection emails, submission IDs, and DOIs are reproduced verbatim and available on request for verification.

Case 01 2026-05-12

Rejected for being public — then made more public, in the same hour, by the same publisher

Cognitive Neurodynamics + Research Square (Springer Nature)

A consciousness-measurement manuscript was rejected on similarity to the author's own openly-licensed deposits — Zenodo preprint, SSRN posting, code repository, three prior papers. Seventy-five minutes after the rejection email, the publisher's own preprint subsidiary deposited yet another copy of the same manuscript under a new DOI, with a congratulations email. The journal arm and the preprint arm of the same publisher triggered both ends of the contradiction in the same evening.
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Case Studies

Rejected for being public — then made more public, in the same hour, by the same publisher