Written: May 15, 2022
A few weeks ago I reached a low-point in my professional life, that I never dreamed would come to that. It is bad enough to be rejected by so-called peer-reviewed journals (see e.g. here) but getting rejected by the arXiv, that is supposed to be non-judgmental, and that should accept everything that is not pure gibberish or politically objectionable, really wounded my admittedly fragile ego.
Regarding peer-reviewed journals, I made a great suggestion in this opinion, that unfortunately has not yet been adopted. Now that my little gem, that while short, says so much (in particular it draws attention to a yet-better-gem by Mark Levi), was rejected, and the appeal that was considered by "at least three moderators" (per Greg Kuperberg) was unsuccessful, and I feel so strongly that it was wrong, I am hereby making the following suggestion to the arXiv Math Advisory Committee.
Add yet-another-category, in addition to the many already-existing categories, how about calling it math.RE? RE could stand for "Rejection" but also for "Rebuttal". This way authors who believe that their submission was rejected in error would still have a chance to be read, and just as important, also have their rebuttals read. Of course, with the authors' permission.
So my dear learned colleagues, members of the arXiv advisory board, please seriously consider (and adopt!) my fair, reasonable, and inclusive, suggestion. I volunteer to be the first entry in that yet-to-be-launched category, math.RE . So please post this rejected gem, along with my rebuttal.