The ugly side of Peer Review.
The guest editors of the Special Issue on terrestrial meteoritic impacts and impact structures, Prof. Dr. Kord Ernstson (Editor-in-Chief), Dr. Allen West, Dr. Gerhard Schmidt (Co-Editors) have terminated their collaboration with the MDPI Journal GEOSCIENCES with immediate effect (with confirmation from MDPI). The reason is intolerable and ugly manipulation of the peer review process for research articles submitted for the special issue. Thereafter, unchallenged by Geosciences, external intervention (almost certainly from the so-called narrower “impact community”) occurred in the virtually positively terminated review process of several articles with a final REJECT by the Geosciences Academic Editorial, without a single word of notice to us as responsible editors of the Special Issue.
This practice, massively violated against all scientific ethics (which MDPI apparently holds so high), has become intolerable for us. The four research articles already announced for the Special Issue are in preparation for a more honest publication organ.