I can't read the article, but being rejected doesn't have to mean it's bad work.

My mom has helped many PhD students take their degree over the years, and in the process helped with their papers. Several have been rejected, some multiple times. Frequently it was down to presentation issues (the student had not explained the certain things clearly enough or similar), or there was disagreement about how strong conclusions one could draw from the results.

For example, recently a paper was rejected because the experimenters had forgotten or overlooked an important detail which meant they couldn't control for a certain variable. One of the reviewers picked this up, and rejected the paper because the findings could possibly be explained by this uncontrolled variable. So they had to resubmit with a weaker conclusion (this is when my mom got involved).

In this case the review process was harsh but fair. The experimenters had goofed, and the reviewer caught it.

Of course when doing ground breaking experiments, I guess the process might not be optimal. But the majority of scientists are not doing that.

The question is why where they rejected? My wife is a researcher and does a fair amount of peer review and sometimes she has to reject papers, not because their necessarily wrong, but because they're so badly written its hard to tell if they're right or wrong. Other times the research and paper is fine, but the conclusions are overstated, for example claiming that A is better than B, when all they've actually proven is that A is not worse than B. Other times it's great paper in every way, but covering a topic that really isn't relevant for that particular journal.

Basically there are lots of reasons to get rejected that have nothing to do with the quality or validity of the research.

I recently rejected a paper as "This is fine, and really interesting, but no one who reads this journal is going to get it".

An extremely technical paper on centrality metrics in a clinical journal is not the right audience.

I suggested there were ways to approach writing it for that audience, but they'd need to extensively rework the paper. The reason I know that? I've done the same thing, for the same journal.

Surely making sure the paper gets published in the place it will have the greatest impact is good thing.

Also, the review wasn’t anonymous.

So you have to be a generation ahead of your time for your work to be truly enlightening. Rejection is therefore to be expected if your work is really good rather than something churned out. Science progresses one funeral at a time.

A simpler and more elegant solution is hard for the old guard to take in. You are sweeping away years of knowledge that they have built up about their earth-centred universe to propose an all new sun-centred solar system.

If you are in the position of having written some work that is ahead of its time then how do you know that? Rejection isn't good enough. The reasons why are important. If you have not presented your work neatly or used language that others don't like then that won't help. If you haven't talked about some of the smaller points that the learned people think are important about the topic then you could be done for. We need something more than 'rejection', failed for presentation reasons could be helpful so we can know if the jury is out of some 'rejected' ideas.

Nothing ever gets rejected for being twenty years ahead of its time. It would be helpful if this was an option.

If you are actually doing ground-breaking work. There's plenty of scope for doing good work that is boring and mainstream and still high quality enough to be published.

Indeed, my work was of the latter type. It was rejected by Physical Review Letters but accepted by another journal.

One feature of peer review that's overlooked, is that there are different journals with different standards, and you can choose a journal that fits what you're trying to accomplish.