Editors Should Declare Conflicts of Interest

Abstract

Editors have increasing pressure as scholarly publishing tries to shore up trust and reassure academics and the public that traditional peer review is robust, fail-safe, and corrective. Hidden conflicts of interest (COIs) may skew the fairness of the publishing process because they could allow the status of personal or professional relationships to positively influence the outcome of peer review or reduce the processing period of this process. Not all authors have such privileged relationships. In academic journals, editors usually have very specialized skills and are selected as agents of trust, entrusted with the responsibility of serving as quality control gate-keepers during peer review. In many cases, editors form extensive networks, either with other professionals, industry, academic bodies, journals, or publishers. Such networks and relationships may influence their decisions or even their subjectivity towards a set of submitting authors, paper, or institute, ultimately influencing the peer review process. These positions and relationships are not simply aspects of a curriculum, they are potential COIs. Thus, on the editorial board of all academic journals, editors should carry a COI statement that reflects their past history, as well as actual relationships and positions that they have, as these may influence their editorial functions.

The limitations to our understanding of peer review

“…Such editorial biases also relate to issues of epistemic diversity within the editorial process itself, which can lead to knowledge homogenisation, a perpetuation of the 'Matthew effect' in scholarly research [52,53] and inequities in the diffusion of scientific ideas [54]. These issues are further exacerbated by the fact that editors often fail to disclose their conflicts of interest, which can be viewed as compromising their objectivity [55,56], and the extent to which editors treat their reports seriously, as well as any dialogue between them and reviewers and authors [57]. For example, how an editor might decide to signal to authors which reviewer comments are more important to address and which can be overlooked and consequently, how authors might then deal with these.…”

“…While some information can be gained by having journals share data on the peer review workflows and decisions made by editors and the respective recommendations from reviewers, this will only paint an incomplete picture about the functional role of reviewers and how this variation in the division of labour and responsibility influences ultimate decisionmaking processes. While this can be functional to sharing editorial risk in the decision-making [69], it often undermines responsibility with negative implications on the legitimacy of the decision as it is perceived by authors [56].…”

Establishing Rules for Ethicists and Ethics Organizations in Academic Publishing to Avoid Conflicts of Interest, Favoritism, Cronyism and Nepotism

“…For example, Brogaard et al (2014) showed, in a survey exceeding 50,000 papers, how colleagues of editors in 30 finance and economics journals published 100% more when they knew the editor than authors without any association or friendship with the editor. For these reasons, and given the porous nature of critical assessment of editors, who have high responsibilities to the academic base, it has become essential for editors to list their actual or perceived COIs (Teixeira da Silva et al, 2019). However, such relationships might not always constitute a negative relationship or cronyism when trusted colleagues are called upon to assist with peer review, for example, provided that such relationships are properly monitored and managed.…”

Conflicts of Interest Arising from Simultaneous Service by Editors of Competing Journals or Publishers

“…Editors have a wide range of responsibilities [3]: they are responsible for and are expected to safeguard the integrity of the literature that is published in their journals, as well as to ensure honest reporting of research findings, make decisions based on principles of fairness, respect, lack of bias or conflicts of interest (COIs), i.e., impartiality, and transparently implement and verify clear, visible and publishing policies, including those related to misconduct, post-publication peer review, whistle-blowing and the respect of authors' rights, including challenges to editors. As a subset of their responsibilities toward academia and the public, editors' COIs should be clearly indicated on their public curriculum vitae (CVs) [4] and on journals' web pages of editorial boards [5]. Despite this natural assumption, such details are frequently not observed for editors on editorial boards, even of journals that claim to espouse ethical standards established by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) [6].…”