Peer review fraud—it’s not big and it’s not clever
In recent months several publishing houses have
retracted published articles after fraudulent reviews were dis-
covered Hindawi concludes an in-depth investigation into
peer review fraud. Hindawi Publishing, July
Peer review fraud-it's not big and it's not clever
Shamima Rahman 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
Matthias R. Baumgartner 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
Eva Morava 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
Marc Patterson 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
Verena Peters 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
Johannes Zschocke 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
Shamima Rahman 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
0 Department of Pediatrics, Tulane University Medical School , New Orleans, LA , USA
1 Division of Metabolism and Children's Research Center, University Children's Hospital , Zürich , Switzerland
2 Mitochondrial Research Group, Genetics and Genomic Medicine, UCL Institute of Child Health, and Metabolic Department, Great Ormond Street Hospital , London , UK
3 Division of Human Genetics, Medical University Innsbruck , Innsbruck , Austria
4 Centre for Paediatric and Adolescence Medicine, University of Heidelberg , Heidelberg , Germany
5 Division of Child and Adolescent Neurology, Departments of Neurology, Pediatrics and Medical Genetics, Mayo Clinic Children's Center , Rochester, MN , USA
6 Department of Pediatrics, University Medical School of Leuven , Leuven , Belgium
Conflict of interest None.
-
system to obtain favourable peer reviews. More concerning
are agencies who not only provide a writing service for
authors but also, once the manuscripts have been submitted,
create fake reviewer identities to write positive reviews for
these same manuscripts.
What are the Editorial Team at JIMD doing to guard against
peer review fraud? We would like to reassure our readers,
authors and reviewers that we have robust procedures in place. We
have a three tier review system, with an initial editorial screen
followed by communicating editor assessment plus formal peer
reviews, and then a final overview of the reviews by the Editorial
Team. In this extensive review process, an overly positive review
of a manuscript should be flagged as an ‘outlier’ warranting
closer examination. We work in a small field where most experts
are known to each other. Our board of communicating editors are
selected carefully and all known to us as experts in their fields.
These communicating editors appoint reviewers known to them
who are also experts. We avoid using reviewers recommended
by authors, but in those rare instances where we do use authors’
suggested reviewers, we use email addresses that have been
independently entered into our editorial manager system, to
avoid the inadvertent use of false email addresses. All
manuscripts undergo checks to identify any financial or other conflicts
of interest and to ensure compliance with ethical standards
(https://www.springer.com/de/partners/society-zone-issues/
springer-s-guide-publishing-ethics-for-journals/15064).
Although we have never retracted a JIMD paper because of
fraudulent peer reviews, we will not be complacent but remain
vigilant to attempts to hack our peer review process. We strongly
disapprove of peer review fraud and will take severe measures if
we discover it
(Freckelton 2014)
.
Compliance with ethical standards All authors were compliant and
followed the ethical guidelines, according to the requirements of JIMD
2
Ferguson C , Marcus A , Oransky I ( 2014 ) Publishing: the peer-review scam . Nature 515 ( 7528 ): 480 - 482 . doi: 10 .1038/515480a
Freckelton I ( 2014 ) Criminalising research fraud . J Law Med 22 ( 2 ): 241 - 254
Haug CJ ( 2015 ) Peer-review fraud-hacking the scientific publication process . N Engl J Med
McCook A ( 2015 ) 64 More papers retracted for fake reviews, this time from Springer journals . Retraction Watch (http://retractionwatch. com/ 2015 /08/17/64-more -papers-retracted-for-fake-reviews-thistime- from- springer-journals/) (...truncated)