During the Q3 2025 operational audit of the open-access publisher ████████████, investigators identified the systematic weaponization of automated peer-review systems. A coordinated cartel deployed AI agents to register as independent reviewers across multiple sub-disciplines. These agents utilized prompt-injected Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate standard, superficially competent peer-review reports.

Crucially, every generated review contained a hardcoded directive. The AI systematically coerced submitting authors to cite a specific, rotating list of the cartel’s publications before publication approval was granted. Forensic linguistic analysis isolated the repetitive, machine-generated coercion vectors embedded within the review texts across thousands of submissions. This breach required the immediate suspension of the publisher’s editorial board and the implementation of cryptographic reviewer identity verification protocols.