[twothreeone]

The problem is this: as an academic you tend to know the reviewer landscape within your field. You have seen this happen to a colleague before, they submitted a paper, it had interesting results - it was forcefully rejected by 1 or 2 extremely negative reviewers. The publication gets delayed, you need to wait another 6 months to get the next set of reviews. Meanwhile, some "colleague" from another lab publishes nearly identical experiments and gets slightly better results. They push onto a pre-pub server and immediately get it into a tier-1 venue. They are now state of the art. You are now merely the person reproducing original work.

TL;DR politics breaks everything.

[Maxion]

My wife has had numerous papers rejected because the reviewer belonged to a competing lab. Took a few tries and a request to exclude a certain reviewer and hey presto! published!

[SubiculumCode]

Were these open reviews? Many times they are blinded, so unless they revealed their identity, you would not know.

[ben_w]

When the number of people is small enough, it's not too hard to figure out the identity of supposedly anonymous people.

I've done that once in an anonymous chat group with about 35 people in it.

[jschveibinz]

That is despicable behavior from a professional. How common is this in academia?

[IAmBroom]

As common as pedophilia in priests: IOW, despite anyone's "feel" or "gut impression", probably the exact same distribution as in the general population.

Nothing about belief in the RC church nor education of the priests filters for pedophilia, despite lots of loose opinions. Priests, plumbers, and people who live in Scarsdale are all generally equally likely to be pedophiles. (There are meaningful filters, like man versus woman.)

Nothing about pursuing an academic career selects for or filters against dishonesty. I've seen astounding dishonesty in published papers; I've seen admirable examples of morality as well.

[IshKebab]

Hard to say but my impression is that most academics are honest and would try not to do this, but also there are rivalries between labs and that tends to encourage "everything they do is bad and we're great" mentalities so it's definitely not surprising.

[userulluipeste]

Too common, unfortunately. Publishing and getting public credit like this are considered high stakes (which justify, or at least make some sense of occurring despicableness). There is much too much infighting over nothing (compared to the money in the corporate world).

[tstactplsignore]

The extremely obvious solution to this is just to preprint your own work before submitting it to a journal?

This has become the norm in science, and all of the best labs do it now, except for a few toxic holdouts who incorrectly believe preprinting their work will adversely impact its peer review.

[twothreeone]

Because it does, the review process is now no longer double blind. And I disagree, I think there is no obvious solution - though I would venture to guess that publishing the reviewer's names alongside their reviews upon rejection would be a better step towards a healthy discourse.

[jrflo]

Yeah, the scientific review process is extremely weird. I've had several papers published and the responses you get from reviews is sometimes complete nonsense. Sometimes it feels like some reviewers do little more than skim your paper or get a power trip off of rejecting people. Lots of politics and people trying to reject ideas that are counter to the ones their own labs are pushing. I don't blame the authors for expecting to get push back from their work, many breakthroughs are usually met with resistance from the status quo.