‘Nepotistic’ journals fast-track hyperprolific authors

This is really bad. I was reading about a Queensland University Professor being referred to a Crime and Corruption Commission inquiry today. We need some laws to protect against the risk of cronyism. These practices lead to real financial gains and career oppotunities for those who benefit.

Best to introduce quotas.

I am concerned that incoming editor Prof Schlagenhauf thinks that Professor Raoult's publishing practices are defensible, because he produces "a lot of good papers" and that she concludes the NMNI journal was "lucky" to have his papers. This indicates she has no familiarity with COPE guidelines on editors publishing in their own journals, guidelines which the publisher, Elsevier, has signed up to: see https://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines-new/short-guide-ethical-editing-new-editors. For further discussion see http://deevybee.blogspot.com/2020/08/pepiops-prolific-editors-who-publish-in.html. I'd also like to take the opportunity to name the two authors who did most of the heavy lifting on this paper: Clara Locher and Alexandre Scanff.

Its not rocket science. Finding reviewers for papers is a difficult task given that good reviewers are often academics with heavy demands on their time. Research expertise is not uniformly distributed. Typically there is a small number of people with expertise in emerging areas, Papers that are clearly well written and claim novel results are more attractive to potential reviewers than those that are not. Even with blind reviewing Experts get a sense of what category a paper is likely to fall into from the abstract, and respond accordingly to review requests. Sometimes it can take dozens of attempts to find a single reviewer, and some journals require 6+ reviews per paper. Its not an issue if reviewers being unpaid. Its that there are only so many hours in the day/year. Better take away message, Publication data can help - many journals now provide this routinely However some. academics would benefit from better internal peer review.