Publisher retracts 20 of a researcher’s papers — then asks him to peer review

In December of last year, Dove Press — a unit of Taylor & Francis — retracted 14 papers by Marty Hinz, a Minnesota physician who has been sanctioned by the U.S. FDA as well as the Minnesota state medical board. In March, Dove retracted six more. A typical notice:

Concerns have been raised regarding the alleged undisclosed competing interests of some of the authors, and the level of information provided on methodology, study data and process of institutional ethical approval for the published article.

The “competing interests” refer to the fact that Hinz owned a company that sold supplements that were the subject of many of the papers.

But on April 5 of this year, Dove asked Hinz to “join our peer review community to complete a review of the following manuscript” in Risk Management and Healthcare Policy. (Then again, Elsevier has asked us to peer review papers on COVID-19, so apparently publishers have scraped the bottom of the barrel so hard that the bottom fell out.)

We learned of the peer review request from Hinz, who sent us a statement earlier this week that he said had been written “by our corporate attorneys that are working the case regarding our perspective on the events with Dove press and all of the players.” (Hinz said he had not responded to several previous messages from us dating back to 2019 because he no longer uses the email address we used — which we obtained from the now-retracted papers. He declined to name the lawyers or put us in contact with them.)

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