The mega-journal Cureus is eliminating author suggestions for peer reviewers, a prompt that is standard practice at some journals when submitting a manuscript.
According to an email sent August 25 to current and past peer reviewers, the move is “due to the potential conflict of interest” that comes from authors suggesting reviewers who may be mentors and colleagues.
Reviewers recommended by authors are more likely to give positive feedback on papers. And such recommendations gave way to such practices as peer review rings and self-peer review, vulnerabilities that started to thrive more than a decade ago.
Some authors at Cureus have taken advantage of this system. In 2021, a medical resident in New Jersey invited his wife to review his papers without disclosing their relationship, resulting in five retractions. In 2019, another author faked reviewer accounts for two well-known neurosurgeons and was discovered only after a routine editorial audit.
Now, instead of reviewers, authors will suggest five “colleagues or mentors to serve as Advisers,” who will provide “advisory feedback” via inline comments rather than peer review.
Reviewers recommended by authors had until August 28 to submit their peer review feedback, according to the email. Anything submitted after that “will be converted to advisory feedback.”
Hilda Bastian, a meta-scientist, writer and cartoonist in Australia, called the move a “backward step — it’s increasing the risk of bias in the editorial process,” she said.
“Presenting this as a step to ‘empower’ authors to get feedback from mentors and colleagues is an odd argument. You don’t need a journal to get advice from your mentors and colleagues,” Bastian continued.
Adrian Barnett, a researcher at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, said he “can’t see how these Adviser comments will work.” He raised questions regarding whether the comments would be made public, if the peer reviewers have access to adviser comments, and whether the sudden deadline would cause some existing reviewers to rush their comments or simply pull out. (Barnett’s recent work found researchers who were cited in a study they reviewed were more likely to recommend that paper.)
Cureus did not respond to our request for comment regarding the role of the “Adviser” and whether those comments would be required for all submissions.
A representative from Springer Nature, which purchased the journal in December 2022, acknowledged our request for comment but did not answer our questions.
Cureus has retracted 125 papers since Springer Nature acquired the title, 77 of which were for author issues, like fake, unverified or changed authorship, according to our database. Last year, Clarivate’s Web of Science put the journal on hold for concerns about article quality, which the journal has been criticized for in the past.
This isn’t the first attempt the journal has made to improve its publishing practices. In November of last year, Cureus closed six of its “channels” after we reported that they were allowing questionable organizations to hand-pick their own editors.
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