45 editors at PLoS ONE handled 1.3% of papers but account for 30% of all retractions

At PLoS ONE, the world's largest megajournal, a 2025 analysis published in PNAS found that just 45 editors -- representing 0.25% of the journal's editorial pool -- accepted papers that account for more than 30% of the journal's 702 retractions issued by early 2024. These 45 individuals handled only 1.3% of all articles published between 2006 and 2023, yet the papers they shepherded through peer review were retracted at wildly disproportionate rates. Twenty-five of these editors also authored papers in PLoS ONE that were themselves later retracted. This matters because those retracted papers do not simply vanish. They are cited by hundreds of subsequent studies, forming the foundation for clinical decisions, grant applications, and entire research programs. When a paper on cancer biomarkers or drug efficacy is retracted, every downstream study that relied on its findings is weakened -- but almost none of those citing papers are flagged or corrected. Clinicians who read systematic reviews built on this contaminated evidence base may make treatment decisions informed by fabricated data. Patients are the final victims of a chain that starts with a compromised editor clicking 'accept.' This problem persists because megajournals like PLoS ONE operate at a scale where centralized editorial oversight is structurally impossible. The journal publishes tens of thousands of papers per year using thousands of volunteer academic editors, each acting with near-total autonomy over their assigned submissions. There is no systematic audit of editorial acceptance patterns, no real-time dashboard flagging editors whose accepted papers are being retracted at abnormal rates, and no financial incentive for the publisher to build one -- since each published paper generates revenue via APCs regardless of whether it is later retracted. The editorial model treats each submission as an independent event, when in reality, a small number of compromised or negligent editors can poison the entire corpus.