Editors are crucial to the integrity of the scientific publishing process, yet they themselves could face conflicts of interest (COIs), whereby their personal interests interfere with their editorial duties. One such COI stems from the fact that, apart from a few exceptions, the vast majority of editors are research-active scientists with many collaborators. Each such editor could potentially handle submissions from their recent collaborators, allowing the editor to use their power, consciously or otherwise, to treat such submissions favourably, thereby jeopardizing the integrity of the editorial decision. Naturally, a number of policies have been put in place to govern such COI, but their effectiveness remains unknown. We fill this gap by analyzing half a million papers handled by 60,000 different editors and published in 500 journals by six publishers, namely Frontiers, Hindawi, IEEE, MDPI, PLOS, and PNAS. We find numerous papers handled by editors who collaborated recently with the authors; this happens despite policies explicitly prohibiting such behavior. Overall, nearly 3% of journals have a COI rate $\geq$ 10%, and nearly half of them have a COI rate $\geq$ 2%. Moreover, leveraging three quasi-experiments, we find that COI policies have a limited, if any, effect on regulating this phenomenon. Finally, we find that editors are faster to accept submissions from their collaborators, raising the possibility of favoritism. These findings highlight the need for policy reform to assure the scientific community that all submissions are treated equally.

翻译：编辑对科学出版过程的完整性至关重要，但他们自身也可能面临利益冲突（COI），即个人利益干扰其编辑职责。此类冲突的根源在于：除极少数例外，绝大多数编辑都是活跃的科研人员，拥有众多合作者。每位此类编辑都可能处理其近期合作者的投稿，从而能够以有意或无意的方式利用自身权力优待这些稿件，危及编辑决策的公正性。自然，业界已制定多项政策来约束此类COI，但其有效性仍属未知。本研究通过分析来自Frontiers、Hindawi、IEEE、MDPI、PLOS和PNAS六大出版商旗下500本期刊中6万名编辑处理的50万篇论文，填补了这一研究空白。我们发现大量论文由与作者近期存在合作关系的编辑处理，即便相关政策明确禁止此类行为。总体而言，近3%期刊的COI率超过10%，近半数期刊的COI率超过2%。此外，通过三项准实验研究，我们发现COI政策对规范该现象的效果有限（若存在任何效果）。最后，我们发现编辑处理合作者投稿时接受速度更快，这增加了偏袒的可能性。这些发现凸显了政策改革的必要性，以确保科学界所有投稿均获得平等对待。