Reviewers Conflict of interest: failing manuscript to possibly keep dominance A biomedical research area is led worldwide by a certain research group in a particular famous university. They are very productive and advanced, with numerous postgraduate students worldwide, with whom they keep cooperating after their PhDs are finished. They also cooperate with other important universities that have entered their research area. They were basically the pioneers in their area, and put in the public domain some data that is a reference in the field.

Anyone submitting a paper in the same research area will:


Use their vast data set (public domain).
Have reviewers assigned that belong to, or have belonged to this group.


I accuse these reviewers of systematically rejecting the manuscripts they review, in order to:


Bulldoze other groups' advances in the field, thus keeping their dominance.
Get their own postgrads working on the ideas of the papers they are reviewing, where a strategy of taking too long to review (and reject) the papers fits well.


What can I do, in order to overcome this predicament?

Of course most of the magazines allow for the authors to list a set of people they would prefer not having as reviewers, but in this case this group contains many researchers, scattered around the world, and there seems to exist a great level of cooperative work and well established alliances.
The vast majority of scientists are ethical people. To claim that every single one in that group is unethical to the point that they gratuitously reject other people's papers does not comport with my view on my fellow scientists. 

My approach to getting papers rejected is to make an honest assessment of why the paper was criticized, and then to set out to write better papers. Statistically, journals reject about 2/3 of all papers, so having a world view of "My paper was just not well enough written" is at least not incompatible with empirical evidence, and I find that a far easier perspective on life than to have to assume that all of my colleagues are unethical people.

All of this isn't to say that it never happens that someone behaves unethically -- it almost certainly does -- but that the assumption that everyone does is probably wrong and, moreover, that it's not productive to think that way because there is nothing you could do about your fate if that were so. A growth mindset in which you take setbacks as an opportunity to learn and do better -- regardless of the reasons for the setback -- is, in the long run, a more productive approach.