PLOS One Flags Peer Review Concerns in Sports Lottery Study

The editors of PLOS One have issued an Expression of Concern for a 2024 paper that examined how China’s sports lottery sector might develop along a path toward common prosperity by 2035. The notice, published on October 22, 2026, applies to the article by Yao, Wan, Long, Bu and Zhang, which appeared in the journal in January 2024 under the title “In quest of China sports lottery development path to common prosperity in 2035.”

According to the editorial notice, the Expression of Concern was triggered because the article was identified as one of a series of submissions about which the journal has concerns regarding the integrity and reliability of the peer review process.

A key element of the notice is what it does not conclude. PLOS stated that, in following up on the matter, it did not evaluate the article’s integrity or scientific validity. The Expression of Concern therefore flags a procedural concern about how the manuscript moved through peer review rather than a finding about the data, methods or conclusions reported in the study.

The notice also draws a distinction between the review process and the authors’ behavior. The editors explicitly stated that they do not have concerns regarding the authors’ conduct during the peer review process. In this case, the journal located its worry in the review pipeline that handled the submission, not in actions attributed to the author team.

For readers, the practical instruction from the editors is direct: the article should be interpreted with consideration of the peer review issue described in the notice. Anyone citing the 2024 paper on China’s sports lottery and common prosperity policy is being asked to weigh that caveat alongside the study’s content.

The flagged article remains part of the journal’s 2024 volume, and the Expression of Concern itself carries its own DOI, published in volume 21, issue 10 of PLOS One. The notice is authored by The PLOS One Editors and distributed under the journal’s open access Creative Commons Attribution License, meaning the warning is freely available to the same audience that can access the original paper.

The episode highlights a challenge for open access journals that handle very large submission volumes: peer review is the gatekeeping mechanism on which published findings depend, and when its integrity or reliability comes into question across a series of submissions, editors can flag the affected papers even before any assessment of the research itself is complete. Readers and researchers following work on sports lottery policy in China now have an explicit editorial marker to factor into how they use the 2024 study.

Subject of Research: An Expression of Concern issued by PLOS One editors over the peer review process for a 2024 study on China's sports lottery development path toward common prosperity by 2035.

Article Title: Expression of Concern: In quest of China sports lottery development path to common prosperity in 2035

Article References: The PLOS One Editors (2026). Expression of Concern: In quest of China sports lottery development path to common prosperity in 2035. PLOS One, 21(10), e0360886. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0360886

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0360886

Keywords: PLOS One, Expression of Concern, peer review, research integrity, sports lottery, China, common prosperity, editorial notice, open access, scientific publishing, Expression, Concern