This publication has been under traditional (that is anonymous, pre-publication) peer-review for the better part of three years before publication here. It has made the round among various journals and I knew of it before it ever landed on my desk.

Much of the criticism which prevented publication was technical. While some of the contended issues could be clarified, some of the issues still stand. There are some alternative explanations, which still cannot be fully ruled out using the technique presented in this publication.

Why was this paper published then?

Because of the combination of two main reasons:

1. The basic principle described in this paper has in the meantime been discovered using more reliable techniques now also by other groups and in other animals, e.g.:

Gaudry, Q., & Kristan, W. (2009). Behavioral choice by presynaptic inhibition of tactile sensory terminals Nature Neuroscience, 12 (11), 1450-1457 DOI: 10.1038/nn.2400

Maimon, G., Straw, A., & Dickinson, M. (2010). Active flight increases the gain of visual motion processing in Drosophila Nature Neuroscience, 13 (3), 393-399 DOI: 10.1038/nn.2492

Chiappe, M., Seelig, J., Reiser, M., & Jayaraman, V. (2010). Walking Modulates Speed Sensitivity in Drosophila Motion Vision Current Biology, 20 (16), 1470-1475 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2010.06.072

Haag, J., Wertz, A., & Borst, A. (2010). Central gating of fly optomotor response Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107 (46), 20104-20109 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1009381107

While these publications of course do not automatically validate the data obtained by Tang & Juusola, they nevertheless provide circumstantial evidence that the effect the authors believe to have discovered is not completely outside the realm of the possible. On their own, the data presented here are not quite sufficient to draw the conclusions in the text.

2. It is not possible for the authors to perform additional experiments, because the one who performed the experiments, Shiming Tang, has moved fields and is not working on Drosophila any more. Thus, rather than letting the data be forgotten, I decided to publish this paper, such that maybe other colleagues can pick the method up and perform additional experiments.

I fully realize that this may be a controversial decision and am open to discussion.