Elsevier says it is reassessing its procedures for special issues after one of its journals issued expressions of concern for six such publications, involving as many as 400 articles, over worries that the peer review process was compromised.
The journal, Microprocessors & Microsystems, published the special issues using guest editors.
The EoCs vary slightly, but the journal has issued the following blanket statement for these six issues:
- Embedded multi/manycore processors for ml/dl in medical cyber physical systems. (notice)
- Evolutionary Algorithmic Computational Techniques for VLSI Design and Many-Core Embedded Systems (notice)
- Cyber physical Microsystems for signal processing and navigation systems (notice)
- AI based smart precision agriculture using Embedded IoT for sustainable environment (notice)
- Artificial intelligence and Internet of People for hyper connected cyber physical systems (notice)
- Hybrid artificial intelligence in embedded system for smart industry (notice)
Subsequent to the acceptance of papers in these Special Issues by the responsible Guest Editor(s), the integrity and rigor of the peer-review processes were investigated and confirmed to fall beneath the high standards expected by Microprocessors & Microsystems. Unfortunately, due to a configuration error in the editorial system, the Editor in Chief or designated Handling Editor did not receive these papers for approval, as per the journal’s standard workflow. This configuration error was a temporary issue due to system migration and was corrected as soon as it was discovered.
Given the journal’s duty to preserve the integrity of the scientific record, all papers published as part of these six Special Issues are currently being independently re-assessed. Following this assessment, readers will be further updated in accordance with Elsevier and Committee on Publication Ethics best practices, as the Editor in Chief finds necessary.
In light of this and other cases, Elsevier has performed a general review of its overall processes regarding Special Issues in all subject areas. In addition to our existing processes for validating Special Issue proposals and the identities and qualifications of Guest Editors, we are introducing further checks to ensure that all accept decisions are confirmed by an Editor in Chief or editorial board member and to alert staff to irregularities as a Special Issue progresses.
While it’s not clear what exactly happened in this case, at least four journals have been scammed by rogue editors in the past two years.
Andrew Davis, a spokesman for Elsevier, told us:
In the spring of 2021, the Editor in Chief raised concerns regarding some individual accepted papers in various Special Issues. Elsevier then supported the Editor by initiating a broader investigation of the overall peer-review processes in the six Special Issues for which Expressions of Concern are being issued. At this stage, the Editor’s overall concerns regarding these Special Issues are serious enough to alert readers, while the published papers are each re-assessed one-by-one and any specific concerns are raised with the relevant authors.
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All this could have been avoided if they had just hired and paid normal editors, instead of trying to extract fee labor in the form of “guest” editorships.
We have learnt via RW about the Expressions of Concern published by Microprocessors and Microsystems.
We have been looking at this journal independently since late April.
Our preprint https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06751 presents our findings starting with the identification of ‘tortured phrases’ (‘counterfeit consciousness’ instead of ‘artificial intelligence’) occurring in the articles of this journal.
One important thing we’d like to stress concerns regular papers in volumes 80-83 which share significant characteristics with the possibly problematic papers in the special issues.
The problematic papers we found appear here: https://www.irit.fr/~Guillaume.Cabanac/problematic-paper-screener
Peer review in general has fallen well below any respectable standard. Often the only real reviewing that seems to take place is done by the public at large. Which is far too late in the process.