I recently submitted two lengthy accounts of Great Lakes diatoms to a journal for plant and algal taxonomy, with the hopeful goal that they would be published as “monographs”. These books were about 15 years in the making, including hundreds of photos, taxonomic accounts, autecological data and species location information. One was a floristic account (many new observations but no new species) and the other contained over 100 newly described taxa. Both were rejected – bummer. I am extremely thankful to the editors and referees, especially given the amount of material they had to trudge through to complete the reviews. There was consensus that the volumes are valuable and should be published, particularly because many of the taxa have obviously never been described, and there are no similar accounts for the Great Lakes. Many of the noted errors are easily fixable, but the major comments appear to be more overarching but personal views on how taxonomy works, or should work. Unfortunately, the recommendations for “more” are simply not possible. Without getting into details, it would take years to complete the requested additions given a lack of time and funding. So, unless I take the less-desirable route of self-publishing (as one referee suggested) I worry that this was all a waste of time and this work will never be shared outside our own research team. I welcome ideas on a way forward and thoughts on any or all of the following major points. I include paraphrased reviewer issues followed by my views on each. I realize it may be hard to respond to some of these without actually seeing what was produced, so I’d be happy to provide links to the complete drafts for anybody requesting them.

Reviewer: “Uniformity and quality of the images. LM pictures need to be of excellent quality to show the important details, preferably at 2000 or even 3000 times. SEM pictures are needed to confirm identifications.”

My response: Granted, some images are not ideal, especially for rarer taxa that didn’t have perfect specimen orientation or were broken. This is generally a problem for hard-to-find taxa. We no longer have the time or funding to search for better specimens of hundreds of rare species on our existing slides. New species aside, does an account not have value if the images are less than perfect? The need for SEM is consistently brought up, and while we have the means to add SEM images for some more common taxa, does it disqualify publishing if we do not? Such a requirement prevents us from presenting taxa with interesting LM images but hard-to-find SEM accounts.

Reviewer: “…this is a reference set of images and some text for the study conducted, like a set of plates that accompanied a project. The text for many specimens is too concise to be of any use.”

My response: Basically, for known taxa we provide the essential data -- striae counts, dimensions, etc. – but cite antecedent accounts for greater detail. Where it is an unknown or unique taxon, those morphological details are provided. There are dozens of books and articles that provide taxonomic accounts that provide minimal morphological description when it is cited as available elsewhere. I believe it is unnecessary to restate morphological details for every species if they already match previous (and cited) work. We expand on what we observed in Great Lakes specimens relative to previously published statistics, but if full morphological descriptions are needed for all taxa all the time, then that is also a game-ender in terms of the time required. Our research team spends significant time keying out taxa under a microscope, so I know that photographic light-microscope accounts such as this are valuable, even though descriptions may be concise (but correct!).

Reviewer: On naming new species: We named many but were instead encouraged by reviewers to present “problematic” specimens as “cf.” taxa or with provisional names or numbers, instead of adding a large number of “superfluous” names to a diatom literature that is already cluttered. Again, it was generally stated that SEM (or even DNA!) evidence is required before we should be naming new species.

My response: Doesn’t this defeat the idea of practicing taxonomy? Creating provisional names adds little to our knowledge of diatoms. It only suggest we saw some unique specimens but we will not name them for some unclear reason. How does naming new taxa "clutter" the diatom literature? The names are proposed and it is the role of the greater diatom community to either accept the work, demonstrate the errors or expand the knowledge of the taxon in question. This is what has been done throughout our history, for the most part using LM images and descriptions (as we have done).

Reviewer: “Diatom species concepts are dependent on documentation of the range of size and shape. It is simply unacceptable practice to describe species based on limited knowledge. Publication of these taxa would introduce many new problems for diatomists, rather than representing an important contribution to the science.”

My response: What new problems are introduced? That there a large number of new taxa to deal with? Rarely does somebody publish a new species with the range of size and shape of a new taxon, if that is even knowable. What is "limited" knowledge? For instance, authors often state that a new taxon is “known only from the type locality (=one site)”. Is this not limited knowledge because it hasn’t yet been seen elsewhere? Where do we draw the line?

Ultimately, most of the above requests appear to want taxonomic accounts that are perfect and unassailable. I worry that sounds like I’m trivializing this process. We do plan to make the volumes better by addressing some of these concerns for some species, but not to the extent expressed by reviewers. Hence, I hesitate to spend more time on this until it seems like there is a way forward for publication.