Should academic journals begin to second-guess guest editors?
That question gained new urgency last week when the British Medical Journal’s publishing group retracted nearly its entire guest-edited special edition of the Journal of Medical Genetics, dedicated to cancer immunotherapies. In the retraction note, the journal writes that it was, in part, because of “compromised peer review in almost all articles.” The notice garnered attention for its scope, but also because it exemplified larger concerns that research integrity advocates have with guest-edited editions, which are also called special issues in some journals.
Because of pared down peer-review processes, along with new financial models that encourage journals to publish these issues en masse, they have become vehicles to pad researchers’ CV’s and journals’ bottom line, while endangering the quality of academic literature, critics say. In 2024, for example, Springer Nature retracted 34 papers from special issues because of “compromised editorial handling and peer review,” Retraction Watch reported.
“I don’t know why anyone is surprised that they have so many problems. You’re not holding all of it to the same level of scrutiny that even peer reviewed papers are, which, as you and I both know, is not as high as a lot of people think it is,” said Ivan Oransky, director of the Center for Scientific Integrity, which publishes Retraction Watch.
The publication’s database of more than 64,000 retractions includes about 20,000 entries that are likely tied to paper mills, many of which are published in special issues, he added. “Why are we surprised that bad actors will find vulnerabilities in a vulnerable system?”
The origin of the guest-edited model was innocuous. Print editions of a journal would sometimes publish what was called a “festschrift,” which was a small insert dedicated to celebrating the career of a prolific scientist who had died or retired, and included studies that built on his or her work along with research from mentees and collaborators. Some journals would also enlist guest editors if they wanted to create a special issue to commemorate a specific conference or key into a buzzy topic.
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But the use of guest editors has multiplied in recent years, because of the rise of digital publishing, which simplified production of such issues, as well as changing financial models. Journal websites typically operated with a paywall, but in response to criticism that this made research inaccessible to the general public and scientists outside of well-funded academic institutions, many publishers began to embrace open-access models. Rather than charging readers to get past the paywalls, journals charged academics article processing charges, or APCs, to host their papers.
Overnight, journals went from being incentivized to publish highly curated, top quality papers that ensured readers would return to their site, to producing a high volume of papers and bringing in more revenue from APCs. The number of special issues among several top publishers increased by the thousands from 2016 to 2022, according to one analysis. Another paper estimated that from 2018 to 2022, special issues made up 20% of the articles published by the publishing house Elsevier, around 11% of the articles published by Springer Nature, and around 12% by Taylor and Francis.
“There are accountability issues up and down the chain. These special issues now have shifted from doing an occasional kind of interesting little tail wag for readers based on what a luminary in the field thought might be kind of neat. Now there’s a huge baked-in incentive via APCs and commercial players who have learned to game the literature to turn them into a playground of bad science,” said Kent Anderson, a consultant who has written about how the internet has disrupted science publishing.
The incentives for journals and researchers are often at odds with the incentives for publishing good science, which has been particularly true of special issues. The filter of peer review, meant to weed out subpar science, tends to be more porous with special issues. The process of peer review is often shrouded in secrecy to allow colleagues to criticize one another without professional repercussions, but one paper found that special issues tend to have faster turnaround times for articles, as well as lower rejection rates.
Part of the business model of guest-edited issues is outsourcing editorial responsibilities as well as trust, said Paolo Crosetto, an experimental economist at the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment.
Journals “will give you the power to edit a special issue, so you have an incentive to bring your papers and to contact friends and colleagues that will trust you,” he said. “It looks like a pyramidal marketing scheme. If I am a publisher, that is not really well known, but I manage to get [you] in this special issue, then your colleagues know you, so they trust you. I delegate trust, and I get people on board. And it worked. I mean, it worked wonders.”
In a preprint from January, Crosetto and colleagues refer to guest-edited issues as the “largest delegation of editorial power in the history of scientific publishing.” But that power is not always exercised appropriately — that paper found that in 13% of special issues across the past decade, more than a third of the papers were authored by the guest editor.
There are signs of change — lawmakers and the National Institutes of Health have both signaled their intent to curb the amount that federally funded researchers spend on journal publications. Two leaders of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the country’s largest private funder of medical research, also recently published a paper on realigning the incentives for researchers and journals in favor of better science. This year, the prestigious funder began requiring its researchers to publish their work first as a preprint, which will be used to evaluate their requests for future funding.
“When scientific quality and noteworthiness are signaled by the publication venue, it encourages the rise of practices that are antithetical to good science. These undermine a system in which the vast majority of actors still operate with integrity,” said Bodo Stern, HHMI’s chief of strategic initiatives, and one of the authors of the paper. “We hope this growing attention will accelerate the shift.”