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I have recently received an email from the editor manager of the journal. In this email, they mentioned, because of unforeseen circumstances, they need to cancel their request.
I am really confused because I spent a lot of time reviewing the article and I don't know why they did that.
Is it ethical for journal to cancel accepted review request before deadline?
In some circumstances, it would be ethically required to cancel the review request. The editor has avoided wasting more of your time by cancelling the request.
"Unforseen circumstances" probably means the authors withdrew the manuscript.
Canceling a review request can also occur when another reviewer has submitted a review which ensures the manuscript cannot be published.
I don't see an ethical issue here. It wasn't very courteous, of course, to not give you any reason at all. They could have just let you submit it and then buried it, I suppose. But it might have been done to save you some work if you weren't ready to submit it yet.
They have probably made some editorial decision that makes your review moot. I can't predict what that would be, but more likely a flat reject. Or possibly the paper was withdrawn by the author(s).
And neither is it very courteous to the author(s) unless it was withdrawn.
If you want an action item, write back that you've nearly completed the review and that you can send it along and that it might be useful to the authors.
A journal I handled once received a paper which was proceeding as normal, except one of the reviews came back very quickly. The reviewer said he had firsthand knowledge that the author was not behaving ethically, and had submitted the manuscript without the consent of his co-authors, who in fact did not think the manuscript was publishable. When I saw that, I wrote to all the other reviewers telling them effectively what your editorial manager told you, and desk rejected the paper.
It's obviously a less than ideal solution and it's possible some of the other reviewers have wasted their time, but what else should (could) I have done? The alternative would be to let the reviewers finish the reviews and then desk reject anyway, which wastes even more time (for both reviewers & authors).
Therefore I see it as ethical, if only because the other option is even worse.
To give an unorthodox answer: if you're unhappy that you spent time reviewing the paper, and feel frustrated that the review request was canceled, one idea would be to look around the Web to check whether the paper you were reviewing has been posted publicly online as a preprint.
If it is, then in principle you could have discovered and read it by yourself. So you could try to use the reviewing work you already did to some benefit, e.g.:
Of course, some additional efforts may be needed: reviewing for a journal anonymously is not the same as directly contacting the authors or posting the review publicly in your name. So you'd have to work more on this, which you'd have to see if you are interested in doing.
To be fair, what I'm proposing here is somewhat unconventional, so maybe there are reasons not to do it. But in my opinion, if you already did substantial work on the review, it'd be a shame to have it go to waste and these are options to put it to some use.
(Come to think of it, what happened to you is a pretty good reason to only accept to review work which is publicly available as a preprint, so as to ensure in advance that your work won't become useless if the request is rescinded.)
