I hope the authors ignored the bogus review

Dear editor:

We previously had submitted an article to your journal, and it got rejected. One of the two reviews we received was bland and the other one apparently had been copied over from another review and had nothing to do with our submission:

Have you seen this review?

When I pointed this out to you, we did not receive any answer. Later, you asked me whether I’d be willing to review a paper, so I decided to reuse the bogus review we had been graced with, and I explained my reasoning publicly:

To review or not to review

I never knew what came out of my review (I accepted the submission). From your email today it appears you rejected the submitted article. Based on the decision letter in the submission system, you sent them my obviously inappropriate review.

This is truly disconcerting. If you had done your job, you would have caught my bogus review and not sent it to the authors.

But now you are asking whether I’d be willing to review a revised version of the paper you had rejected. According to your email, the authors have prepared a revision based on reviewer feedback, including the bogus review I had submitted.

I’m torn. I’d like to have a third instance of your journal’s obvious failure of quality control, before I contact your organization. However, I think it is inappropriate to keep playing a charade of make-belief peer review that wastes peoples time.

So I respectfully decided to decline and send you this letter instead. I hope you’ll read it this time.

Here is a list of activities where you failed to follow proper procedure:

• For our submission, you did not check the reviews and so decided based on faulty input data
• You did not respond to my repeated inquiries about this failure to perform basic editor duties
• You did not check my review that you had requested for someone else’s submission either

I’m eagerly awaiting your response.

With kind regards, Dirk Riehle