Compromised peer review system in published papers

On noticing a high volume of submissions from corresponding author A, editor X flagged up concerns with the preferred reviewers being suggested and their comments. Author A had in most cases suggested the same preferred reviewers for each submission, preferred reviewer accounts had non-attributable email addresses, comments were being returned very quickly (within 24 hours) and were often brief and positive, largely restricted to grammatical changes. All preferred reviewers favoured immediate acceptance or acceptance subject to minor revisions.

Author A was asked to provide further information on the preferred reviewers and admitted that these were either dummy accounts or associates of author A. The dummy accounts had email accounts accessible by author A and/or author A’s students or collaborators. Author A asked the preferred reviewers (or the people behind the accounts) to submit favourable reviews of the papers and turn them around quickly or author A submitted the reviews via the dummy account. Author A admitted employing this system for a number of papers, but not every paper, although we found similar patterns of peer review activity for these also. Author A states that the papers’ co-authors were not aware of this activity.

Author A has agreed to retract published papers for which they admit to influencing the peer review process and we are planning retraction notices for these. We are now seeking advice as to what to do about the remaining published papers to which author A has not admitted influencing the peer review process. We suspect the peer review of these other articles was compromised through use of preferred reviewers suggested by author A, but we have no evidence that these preferred reviewers used dummy accounts or that the article content is flawed. We are therefore considering issuing an expression of concern for these papers.

We have attempted to make contact with all co-authors to explain the problem and seek their approval for the chosen course of action. Only three co-authors have responded, two supporting our decision, and one (whose paper we planned to issue an expression of concern for) replied that it was unfair on the co-authors without any concrete evidence. Author A’s institution has been contacted but we have received no response.

We respectfully ask COPE to provide advice on managing those papers author A has not agreed to retract and, in particular, the case where a co-author disagrees with our intention to issue an expression of concern