In the world of scientific publishing, a hidden and vast black industry, the * factory, is threatening academic integrity.
Mass production in factories is often suspected of quality issues such as data falsification and plagiarism, which has had a bad impact on the academic community.
In November last year, Nature published an article pointing out that the academic community is facing a huge problem of counterfeiting. About 2% of the scientific research published in 2022 alone came from ** factories. In the biological field and medicine**, the proportion even reaches 3%.
For many years, the academic community has been criticizing the phenomenon of **factory writing**.
This is not science and has started to **new** factory "fraud tricks"!
Academic fraud "new tricks".
According to Science News, a recent investigation by Science and Retraction Watch, with the participation of experts such as Nicholas Wise, a fluid dynamics researcher at the University of Cambridge, found that factories are now bribing journal editors and installing people on editorial boards to promote problematic publication.
One night in June 2023, Nicholas Wise stumbled upon a novelty on Facebook.
Wise is very familiar with the signs of a factory: or buying an author slot and science. But this time, Wise sees something different.
A man who calls himself Jack Ben, who works for a company called Olive Academic, did not target potential authors and reviewers, but instead chose journal editors — offering large sums of cash to these gatekeepers in exchange for them accepting the publication.
In a document linked to the Facebook post, Ben promised potential collaborators that "you're definitely going to make money from us," along with screenshots of transfers of up to $20,000 or more (the recipient's name and the title of two ** posts are vaguely visible in several screenshots).
More than 50 journal editors have signed agreements with it, and there is even a *** for interested editors to fill out, he wrote.
When contacted by a reporter through **, Ben seemed to think that a journal editor had approached him for cooperation, saying, "I have a lot of clients who want to publish and need a partner to help his ** get into the journal." ”
Ben explains: "We pay half of the fee after we receive it, and we pay the other half after we publish it. He pointed out that the level of the journal depends on the grade of the journal.
When Ben realized that he was not talking to the journal editor, he asked to switch the communication to WhatsApp. In written communication, he insisted on denying paying editors, claiming that his company only provided advice on manuscripts. In addition, he deleted most of his posts on Facebook.
But Olive Academy's relationship with an editor named Malik Alazzam doesn't match Ben's claims.
On LinkedIn, Alazzam describes himself as "the editor of the journals Scopus and ISI" and a former researcher and assistant professor in Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and Jordan.
Screenshots posted by Ben on Facebook recruiting new editors and advertising to authors clearly show Alazzam's connection to Olive Academic.
One of the two articles in the screenshot is titled "Influencing Factors of Gastrointestinal Function Recovery after Gastrointestinal Malignant Tumor", published in a special issue of Hindawi's Journal of Healthcare Engineering in 2021 and edited by Alazzam.
Three days after the article was accepted, screenshots show that Olive Academic paid $840 to Tamjeed Press; The publisher's ** shows that Alazzam is the only member of the team, and Alazzam's LinkedIn profile also shows that he is the editor of the team.
According to Wise, Tamjeed Publishing not only has a partnership with Alazzam, but the company also acts as a broker, splitting payments from the ** factory with a number of editors, including Omar Cheikhrouhou of Tair University in Saudi Arabia and SFaff University in Tunisia.
Cheikhrouhou is another ** "relationship between business administration ability and innovation ability formation of university students based on data mining and empirical" posted by Ben on Facebook Research", two days after being accepted into a special issue of Hindawi's mobile information system, Olive Academic paid Tamjeed $1,050.
The above two articles were retracted on November 1, 2023, along with Wiley, the parent company of Hindawi, retracting thousands of peer-reviewed damaged special issue articles and removing hundreds of editors for misconduct.
Academic fraud has become a scale
Olive Academic and Tamjeed aren't the only companies hiring editors with dubious credentials, there are also some companies that have completely fictitious identities.
For example, Anna Abalkina, a social scientist at the Free University of Berlin, said in a recent preprint that a family called TanuPro's Ukrainian ** factory took advantage of the sometimes lax editorial scrutiny of journals to install an editor who was still a student or had just received a master's degree - a "doctor" of mashtaler
The editor, Liudmyla Mashtaler, who worked as a special issue editor at Review of Education in 2022, accepted several articles related to the **factory**, which were subsequently retracted on November 5, 2023. Mashtaler later also became a member of the magazine's editorial board.
However, Abalkina did not find any evidence that Mashtaler had a Ph.D. (although she was listed as a "PhD" on the editorial board**); A document from Ukraine** in 2020 called her a first-year master's student.
In another case, the editor of the Hindawi special issue, identified from the Olive Academy advertisement, appeared to be inconsistent with his real identity. Wise believes that it is the ** factory that has been organizing this special issue from beginning to end.
A scientist who graduated from a Chinese medical school also described this strategy: in this case, the **factory handles all communication with the journal, including asking questions first, either by colluding with real academics or by fabricating a false identity for the occasion.
This issue is not limited to special issues. Most of the dozen or so special issue editors associated with the company are also permanent editors at Wiley, Elsevier and other journals in the Olive Academy ad.
Siddhesh Zadey, a Ph.D. student at Columbia University, has first-hand experience with this type of marketing. Last summer, while he was visiting his parents in India, he was contacted by Dr. Sarath from Itrilon on WhatsApp, offering a "ready-made" authorship and promising "100% acceptance".
Zadey is also the co-founder of ASAR, an India-based think tank that solves social problems through research. For more information, he pretends to be a medical student who knows nothing. He asked Sarath. Has the article been accepted? ”
"We have a connection with the journal editors and can guarantee ** acceptance," Sarath said. ”
In an interview, Sarath acknowledged authorship but denied collusion with the editor. However, the company's associated ** suggests that journal editors may be involved. When Sarath pitched to Zadey, he touted an accepted "original research article" with five available author slots. Fourteen days after the ad was published, the article was published in the journal Life Neuroscience by six authors, two of whom are also senior editors of the journal.
The publisher was quick to point out that most of the tens of thousands of editors they worked with were honest and professional. But they also say they are under siege by the "corruption" of these fraudulent forces. A spokesperson for Elsevier said that the mill provides weekly cash to editors in exchange for them accepting manuscripts.
Jean-Fran Ois Nierengarten of the University of Strasbourg, co-chair of the editorial board of the journal Chemistry-A European Journal, published by Wiley, was targeted in June 2023. He received an email claiming to be working with a "young scholar" in China and offered to pay $3,000 for each article he helped publish in the journal.
But Xiaotian Chen, a University librarian at Bradley University who has studied China's most advanced factories, said publishers are not blameless. He pointed out that the tens of thousands of special issues published by publishers in open access journals each year show no signs of decreasing, and these special issues are reportedly still the top target of the factory. Some for-profit publishers are as greedy as factories.
The reason why "the sword goes sideways".
Matt Hodgkinson of the UK's Office of Research Integrity, an independent charity, estimates that at least tens of millions of dollars go to ** factories each year. Many publishers and journals are aware of this threat, bolstering their research integrity teams and retracting up to hundreds of factory articles. They're working on ways to better spot factory articles, such as screening tools that can flag fakes.
As a result, the cash-rich ** factories have apparently adopted a new tactic: bribing editors and installing their own ** people on editorial boards to ensure the publication of their manuscripts.
The survey shows that several ** factories and more than 30 editors from well-known journals appear to be involved in such activities. Most are guest editors of special issues, but a few are permanent editors or editorial board members of the journal.
These reports are likely to be just the tip of the iceberg. Hodgkinson recalls hearing from a publisher that "300 editors had to be fired because of manipulation."
*: Zhonghong Boyuan Biology.
Article compiled from: scienceorg/content/article/***mills-bribing-editors-scholarly-journals-science-investigation-finds