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

Timeline

From curator assignment to rejection: approximately fifty-eight hours, over two days. From submission to rejection: nearly five days. The manuscript was never sent to manuscript reviewers. The Research Square deposit of the same manuscript was published seventy-five minutes after the rejection email, by the same corporate parent. All timestamps in this case are taken from the author's records and from Research Square's own published metadata for the deposit.

The Decision, In Full

Your manuscript "The Dynamic Existence Threshold: Measuring Consciousness in Complex Systems" has now been assessed. If there are any reviewer comments on your manuscript, you can find them at the end of this email.

Regrettably, your manuscript has been rejected for publication in Cognitive Neurodynamics.

Comment: This article has reached over 94% with the published articles, so it must be rejected.

The full text of the rejection comment is reproduced above, verbatim and unedited. No reviewer comments followed.

What the 94% Matched

The submitted manuscript is the journal version of a preprint the author had already deposited in three public archives and discussed across three prior published papers in the same research program. Section 1.1 of the submission restates foundational material from those earlier papers by design, in service of a self-contained presentation. The sources a similarity tool would have matched against — every one of them authored by the submitter, every one of them attached to the same ORCID record:

• Zenodo preprint of the submitted manuscript — 10.5281/zenodo.18373411
• SSRN posting of the same manuscript — abstract ID 6524619
• Open-source code repository — github.com/existencethreshold/dynamic-existence-threshold
• Thornhill 2026a — 10.5281/zenodo.18166974
• Thornhill 2026b — 10.5281/zenodo.18262424
• Thornhill 2026c — 10.5281/zenodo.18319430

All of the above are licensed CC-BY-4.0. All resolve from the submission's ORCID record (0009-0009-3161-528X). A human curator checking the similarity report against the author's own deposits — a step that takes minutes — would have identified the overlap as self-overlap and either filtered it from the score or asked the author about it. Neither happened.

The Author's Response

The author replied to the curation decision thirteen minutes after it arrived, asking whether the similarity report could be re-run with self-deposits excluded, or reviewed manually for self-overlap. The reply documents the six sources above and offers to withdraw the request if the journal's policy treats preprint deposits as disqualifying regardless of authorship.

As of publication of this case study, no response has been received.

Seventy-Five Minutes Later

At 02:54 UTC on 2026-05-13 — seventy-five minutes after Cognitive Neurodynamics sent the rejection email — Research Square posted version 1 of the same manuscript as a preprint under DOI 10.21203/rs.3.rs-9655338/v1. Research Square is wholly owned by Springer Nature. The deposit was the result of Springer's "In Review" service, which the author had opted into at submission. Minutes later, the author received a congratulations email from Research Square:

Your preprint, "The Dynamic Existence Threshold: Measuring Consciousness in Complex Systems," has been posted to Research Square. It has been assigned a DOI and is now a permanent and citable part of the scholarly record.

The deposit was authorized by the author and is not, by itself, anomalous. What is anomalous is the order. The journal arm of Springer Nature rejected the manuscript on the ground that public deposits of the author's own work had driven a similarity score to 94%. Seventy-five minutes later, the preprint arm of the same Springer Nature published another public deposit of the same manuscript — under a new DOI, with a new permanent URL — and congratulated the author on the addition.

The two halves of the company did not coordinate. They could not — they have no mechanism to. The author's submission had triggered both pipelines in parallel, and the right hand finished its work after the left hand had finished its.

Why This Is a Case Study

ICSAC publishes this not because one rejection is uniquely outrageous, but because the failure mode is structural and visible from two angles in the same hour.

First angle. A major journal's submission queue is gated by an automated similarity tool whose output the curation staff above it either cannot, or will not, filter for the trivial case of an author citing themselves. When the tool returns a number and that number is taken at face value, the author pays the cost — in time, in stalled publication, in citations that never accrue, in dissertations and grants keyed to a record that never appears. The journal incurs nothing.

Second angle. The same publisher operates a separate automated pipeline that produces, in the same hour, exactly the kind of public deposit the first pipeline penalizes. The two pipelines do not coordinate. They cannot. The author triggers both at submission and receives the consequences of both, regardless of decision — rejected for being public by one Springer service, made more public by another, on the same evening.

A peer-review system that cannot distinguish "the author cited themselves" from "the author plagiarized" is not a peer-review system. A publisher whose journal rejects a paper for being public, while its preprint arm makes the same paper more public in the same hour, has not built a peer-review pipeline. It has built two automated services with letterhead between them.

What ICSAC Does Differently

Every submission to ICSAC is evaluated by an independent panel against a published six-dimension rubric. Citation verification runs before scoring, not in place of it. Similarity is one signal among many, and is interpreted by a human curator who sees the submitting ORCID and can distinguish self-overlap from plagiarism in the seconds it takes to read it. Every review is published with the accepted paper. Authors do not get desk-rejected because a tool returned a number that no one filtered, and the rejecting pipeline does not run in parallel with another pipeline at the same institute that contradicts it.

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