TL;DR: Sage has retracted eight journal articles co-authored by Yannick Griep, the former editor-in-chief of Group & Organization Management (GOM), after determining he had managed the peer review of his own submissions to the journal he edited — a direct conflict of interest that the publisher says compromised the objectivity of the review process. The retractions are procedurally distinct from, though publicly entangled with, a separate Radboud University research-integrity finding that an unrelated 2025 article by Griep contained fabricated data.
What Sage retracted, and why
On July 14, 2026, Sage published a retraction notice covering eight of the 25 papers Griep co-authored in Group & Organization Management, the Sage-published journal where he served as editor-in-chief from 2022 until 2026. Sage’s stated rationale, as reported by Retraction Watch: “the peer-review process was administered by the former Editor in Chief, who is also the co-author of the articles,” and that arrangement “compromised” the peer review process’s objectivity. Of the eight, most were formally retracted by the publisher; a smaller number were withdrawn at the co-authors’ own request. Sage has said it is continuing to investigate the remaining 17 Griep-authored papers in the journal, so this figure may not be final.
The underlying mechanism is not exotic misconduct like fabricated data or manipulated images — it is an editor-in-chief routing manuscripts he had personally authored through the review pipeline he controlled, without the independent handling a genuine conflict-of-interest recusal would require. That distinction matters for how research offices and editors should read this case: it is a governance and editorial-independence failure first, layered on top of a separate misconduct finding second.
The separate Radboud University finding
Griep was dismissed by Radboud University, his employing institution, in late 2024 — reporting indicates that action followed irregularities in an expense claim he submitted, not the peer-review or data issues that surfaced later. He challenged the dismissal, and that dispute was later resolved through a settlement.
Separately, in early 2026, Radboud’s research integrity committee upheld a complaint concerning a 2025 article by Griep and found evidence of data fabrication — according to reporting, roughly half of the data points in the dataset appeared to duplicate and likely originated from an unrelated master’s thesis. The university characterized the conduct as a “very serious violation of scientific integrity” and ordered a broader review of Griep’s other publications. That broader review is understood to be a separate track from Sage’s peer-review-conflict investigation, though both concern the same author’s body of work. A further data-manipulation finding, reported in May 2026, led Elsevier to retract a separate Griep-authored paper in a different journal, published on a different platform entirely — underscoring that this is now a multi-publisher pattern rather than a single-journal incident.
Because these are two distinct findings by two different bodies — Sage/GOM’s editorial-conflict finding and Radboud’s data-fabrication finding — institutions and editors should be careful not to conflate them when discussing the case: a paper can be retracted purely for a compromised review process without any claim that its underlying data was fabricated, and vice versa.
Why this matters for journal governance
Editor-in-chief self-publication is a known, recurring failure mode in scholarly publishing, distinct from the guest-editor and special-issue abuses that have driven a larger share of recent mass retractions (see CASRAI’s coverage of STAT’s investigation into guest-edited special issues). The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) has long-standing guidance requiring that when an editor is also an author, review and decision-making authority must be handed to another editor or an independent guest editor with no conflict — the editor-author should have no visibility into reviewer identity or influence over the outcome. Sage’s own retraction rationale in this case describes exactly the scenario that guidance exists to prevent.
For research offices, this case is a reminder that retraction notices can rest on procedural grounds entirely separate from data integrity, and that a single high-profile researcher can generate parallel investigations at a former employer, at one or more publishers, with different scopes, different timelines, and different findings. Tracking a case like this accurately — rather than collapsing it into a single undifferentiated “misconduct scandal” — matters for how compliance offices, co-authors, and citing researchers respond to it.
Status and what to watch
- Sage’s investigation into the remaining 17 GOM papers Griep co-authored is ongoing; the retraction count could grow.
- Radboud’s broader review of Griep’s wider publication record, ordered after the early-2026 data-fabrication finding, had not concluded as of this writing.
- At least one other publisher (Elsevier) has independently retracted a Griep-authored paper on separate data-manipulation grounds, suggesting institutions citing his prior work should check retraction status paper-by-paper rather than assuming a single blanket outcome.
This summary reflects reporting available as of July 2026, drawn from Retraction Watch and Times Higher Education coverage cited below. Case details may be updated as Sage’s and Radboud’s investigations continue.
