The publisher Sage has retracted eight papers by a former “rising star” from a Dutch university for a “compromised” peer-review process at a journal he edited.
Last week, Retraction Watch obtained an email from an editor at Sage to the editorial board of Group & Organization Management, stating that, following a “thorough investigation,” the publisher would retract “a subset of articles” by the journal’s former editor-in-chief Yannick Griep. The retraction applies to eight of the 25 papers Griep coauthored in the journal, according to the July 14 retraction notice. The papers were retracted for a “compromised” peer-review process, the notice states.
“As the peer-review process was administered by the former Editor in Chief, who is also the co-author of the articles, the objectivity of the peer-review process has been compromised,” reads a publisher’s note published alongside the retractions. The move “relates to the underlying review process and no determination has been made regarding the scientific content of the articles.”
Six of the articles were retracted at the publisher’s request, and two of the papers were retracted at the request of coauthors, according to the notice.
Radboud University in the Netherlands fired Griep in late 2024 after discovering he had submitted a fake expense report. Earlier this year, the university determined in a now-retracted study, “roughly half of the data points appeared multiple times and likely originated from a master’s thesis about an entirely different study,” Voxweb.nl reported. Griep had committed a “very serious violation of scientific integrity,” said Radboud, which has also opened another investigation into more of his work.
When we asked about the remaining 17 papers in the journal, Laura West, a public affairs manager for Sage, told us the publisher was “continuing to investigate the journal and don’t have anything else to share at this time.”
Griep was editor-in-chief of the journal from 2022 to 2026. The now-retracted articles were published online from 2023 to 2025. All but one had zero to four citations, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. One article has been cited 26 times.
Griep is now a senior adviser at the consulting firm Samergo, according to the company’s website. He did not immediately respond to our request for comment.
Earlier this year, Griep coauthored an editorial in Group & Organization Management called “Calling the Time of Death on Academia: An Obituary and An Autopsy.”
“Rest in peace, dear Academia. Your legacy persists wherever people still treat learning as sacred and knowledge as more than a product,” he and a coauthor wrote. In the piece, he references his “tenure at the Department of (abuse, injustice and mistreatment at) Work, Health (or the lack thereof), and (under) performance.”
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