JAMA's demand for an additional hurdle is unfair—and absurd

Suppose that a biomedical journal invoked a new policy requiring that all authors based in western Europe or North America would receive ordinary peer review, but authors from other countries would receive a peer review with additional hurdles. This policy may seem unfair, but suppose the journal claimed that research has shown that there is a greater prevalence of fraud, bias, and sloppy work among papers coming from these other countries.

If these events actually transpired, we hope that other biomedical journals would rapidly point out that adopting such a policy would be unfair to authors from non-western countries, even if the premises for it were valid. Indeed, we hope that other editors would decide that it would be unethical to create any hierarchical system for submissions of papers to a biomedical journal. Peer review ought to rest …