You should contact the editors. If they don't respond as they should (by removing the reviewer and repeat the review process) you could

a) contact the committee on publication ethics: https://publicationethics.org/

and

b) select another journal because if the editors don't respond to flagrant violations of publication ethics, the journal is corrupted anyway and should not be used.

Good point, Jochen. And one can add that for non-tenured researchers, there is even more pressure to swallow this. In my experience, appealing to the editors was helpful enough. In one case, however, the reviewer was right though articulated a bit short-tempered, and the hints to her/his writings proofed valuable.

Thank you Profs. for your contributions Jochen Glaser and Tim Flink , It is really a serious issue that should be handled with swift actions by editors

I also agree that any issue pertaining to violations of or ambiguities with our current reviewing system is to be discussed very seriously. But I also think such issues should also be discussed on a more generic level. I always refrain from suggesting my own work as a reviewer, even if I honestly think it might help. Even if at good will, this comes with the bias that one knows one's own work the best and thus will quickly appreciate links between the reviewed paper and one's own publications. Hence one can end up not suggesting what might really be an essential point of reference. As for the other situation where a reviewer basically invites her/himself as co-author, this is again ambiguous in my opinion and depends on what the major critical aspects of the paper are. If it is poor style and poor contextualisation within the state of the art, it might really work out well. Although I never invited myself to revise a paper (I'd not have the time for that anyways), I did at one occasion suggest the the author/s consider getting an additional author on board to fix some general shortcoming of a text that did report on a valid and interesting project but was not acceptable even after revision. Long story, short message: there is the level of individual integrity of reviewers and then there is the level of general guidelines and rules. An individual reviewer can mean well, but still do wrong - therefore we need clear rules that take into account the ways the whole system works and can be safeguarded. But we also have to keep in mind that peer-review based quality cotrol is the best we have at hand to safeguard quality, but it is not a solution to or a guarantee for everything. Ambiguous situations will always keep arising.

I do not believe that you can do much. In the era of the bossy states just complaining would be regarded as behaviour of "a rebel without cause". I do not want to sound pathetic but the domain of publications has changed quite rapidly in the last ten years or so. From the era of one author we have moved into the "multiplied-author" regime. Everything has been following the mass education paradigm. Solution: Know your journal as much as possible! So if something unusual happens you could deal with this in a practical-kind of manner. This means you negotiate! I am a rather generous reviewer because I understand the effort authors normally put aiming to publish. But we are all different and at a different stage of our career.

Before reading this thread, I would have been similarly pessimistic and now posts like from Jochen Glaser , Tim Flink and Karen Kastenhofer give me more hope that “moral rightness “ will triumph!

All your answers are very useful in this context. Thank you all