A new analysis using an automated tool called EditorCheck reported thousands of potential violations of journal conflict-of-interest policies involving handling editors and manuscript authors at PLOS and MDPI. Researchers from the University of Toulouse examined more than 340,000 PLOS-journal papers and more than 172,000 MDPI-journal papers by matching metadata for handling editors against coauthorship histories using the Dimensions database. They found that more than 8,000 PLOS papers and roughly 2,500 MDPI papers appeared to violate the respective author-editor collaboration windows (PLOS: five years; MDPI: three years). The study authors cautioned that the tool flags policy breaches but does not prove misconduct or validate whether the review process was compromised. After reaching out, the analysis team said PLOS reassigned some flagged articles to different editors or added supervisory editors, and its ethics team reviewed about 100 additional papers identified by the analysis.