The Committee on Publication Ethics has just recently reported on recent cases of misconduct it has dealt with, some of which are very interesting. This one in particular struck a familiar note, with an author of a paper trying to game the system by having his paper reviewed by sympathetic colleagues. In fact he even created sockpuppet reviewers.
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.
The verdict was damning -
The Forum agreed that there are many issues involved here, not least a serious form of misconduct which may even be criminal, as the author was impersonating the reviewers and committing fraud by using colleagues as false reviewers and, possibly impersonating other reviewers. In addition, as the author has admitted fraud, can the editor trust the validity of any of the papers?
Note, however, that COPE is not a court, merely providing advice to journals on how to proceed.
[I've altered the wording of the first para slightly, just to make it clear that I don't think that climate scientists have used sockpuppet reviewers]