Peer Review Process and some Questionable Practices During COVID-19 Pandemic

Editorial evaluations of manuscripts submitted to a journal first go through an initial screening by the editorial team who can reject the manuscript after screening or take it to the next step of peer review. Peer reviewers independently make a recommendation to the journal editor as to whether the manuscript should be rejected or accepted (with or without revisions). The journal editor considers all the feedback from peer reviewers and makes an informed decision and conveys to the authors. Peer review is the process by which journals scrutinize and regulate the quality of content they publish following strict ethical procedures and practices. However sadly, the COVID19 pandemic has exposed some questionable practices of top journals. We have seen many silent withdrawals and retractions of highly cited papers. In order to make literature available to public, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic many publishers and researchers have sped up their adoption of Open Access practices, sometimes embracing them fully and sometimes partially or in a sub-optimal manner, sharing of data, protocols, and standards. In some instances the use of COVID-19 literature /data has been badly reviewed ,and sometimes not reviewed (preprints) hence retracted, this has posed a public health risk because of misinformation. It is therefore concluded that to minimize such risks proper measures such as more transparency ,if the datasets, peer review reports , editorial comments and decisions, and authors’ responses to papers were released publicly.