Retraction Watch

Crossref suspends company’s membership after Retraction Watch report

Crossref, a nonprofit focused on metadata of scholarly publications, has suspended the membership of a company linked to websites which copied the appearance of journals belonging to Elsevier and Springer Nature, among others from major publishers, Retraction Watch has learned.

The move follows Anna Abalkina’s reporting on Retraction Watch about the activities of Springer Global Publications, which had used its membership in Crossref to assign Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to papers in 13 journals with similar names to those established by legitimate publishers. The DOIs linked to papers on webpages mimicking the appearance of the original journals.

Springer Global Publications did not immediately respond to our request for comment on the suspension of its Crossref membership. The company previously told us it did not “create, review, or manage the content associated with the identifiers we issue,” and did not publish any journals.

The website of the company has also been suspended by its hosting provider, and is no longer available online.

Weekend reads: Cassava’s Alzheimer’s drug fails; new journal hijacking scam; Hong Kong academic jailed

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 450. There are more than 50,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Cancer researcher admitted faking data

A former researcher at Nemours Children’s Health in Wilmington, Del., admitted to falsifying and incorrectly reporting data in at least two published studies, both of which were supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health. The studies have been retracted.

The researcher, Valerie Sampson, reported herself to Nemours, which launched an inquiry into all of her publications, according to a hospital spokesperson. The institution’s findings are under review at the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.

Sampson left Nemours in January 2022 after 16 years with the hospital, according to her LinkedIn profile. She also held a position as an affiliated scientist at the University of Delaware, a role that ended in the same month, per the profile. Six months following her departure from Nemours, Sampson took a position as a scientist at WuXi Advanced Therapies in Philadelphia, a company specializing in cell and gene therapies, for a little over a year. She is currently unemployed, according to the profile.

Company linked to cloned journals of major publishers denies cloning journals of major publishers

After we reported on a new scam to publish papers on webpages remarkably similar to those of Elsevier, Springer, the American Medical Association and other major publishers, the company linked to the clones denied any role in producing the content they contain.

Until we reached out for comment, the company “Springer Global Publication” – which is not affiliated with Springer Nature – had advertised a variety of services on its website, including finding a writer for research papers, editing manuscripts, developing research proposals, analyzing data and managing the peer review process, a collection of services which is a classic attribute of a paper mill. After we emailed them, they removed descriptions of these services from their website, as well as links to papers published in cloned journals, but did not respond before publication of our story.

After our story appeared, we received an email signed by “Administrator – Springergloballtd.com,” in which the company said it did not “create, review, or manage the content associated with the identifiers we issue.”

The company stated:

Exclusive: New hijacking scam targets Elsevier, Springer Nature, and other major publishers

Until recently, journal hijackers do not appear to have targeted titles from big publishers, in part because their well-known website designs made such clones easy to detect.

Typically, cloned versions of journals’ websites are of low quality and don’t resemble the recognizable and professional designs of Springer Nature and Elsevier. As described in previous posts, fraudulent publishers would usually copy the ISSN, title and other metadata of niche and university journals in order to avoid identification, and possibly index their unauthorized content in bibliographic databases such as Scopus or Web of Science.

We’ve cataloged over 300 such cloned journals in the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, a small number of which involve major publishers like Springer Nature, Elsevier and Wiley. For example, earlier this year the Journal of Academic Ethics and Machine Intelligence Research, both published by Springer Nature, were cloned.

But earlier this month, William Black, founder and CEO of PSIref, an online platform aggregating scholarly publication data which offers advertising opportunities for publishers, sent me evidence of a new, more sophisticated scam.

Smithsonian Magazine pulls article for ‘errors’ after criticism of linked map of Israel

A screenshot of Native Land Digital’s interactive map — via Smithsonian Magazine

Smithsonian Magazine has retracted a two-year-old article about an interactive online map describing indigenous lands in North America because the map “did not meet the standards of scholarship we expect of academic projects we cover as part of our editorial purview.”

The move followed sharp criticism from a pro-Israel group about a map produced by a nonprofit organization that formed the basis of the article.

The original article, published on Oct.13, 2022 and titled “This Interactive Map Shows Which Indigenous Lands You Live On,” was based on a map created by Native Land, a Canadian non-profit the article said “is focused on improving both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people’s relationship with the lands around them.” The article encouraged readers to use the map in order to see which Indigenous communities resided in their city, state, or zip code.

Weekend reads: When Dr. Oz appeared in Retraction Watch in 2014; Didier Raoult in the news again; superconductivity researcher out

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 50,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Mega journal Cureus kicks out organizations critics called paper mills

The embattled mega journal Cureus has closed six of its so-called “academic channels,” which it bills as low-cost publication platforms that “will turn your organization into a publishing powerhouse,” Retraction Watch has learned.

The move follows a joint investigation in May by Science and Retraction Watch that found several organizations critics described as dressed-up paper mills had their own channels at the medical journal.

As we reported in September, indexing for Cureus, which is published by Springer Nature, was recently put on hold by Clarivate’s Web of Science, apparently due to quality concerns.

‘Relieved’: BMJ retracts and replaces article on unexpected weight loss as a sign of cancer

The British Medical Journal has retracted an article examining when unexpected weight loss could be a warning sign of cancer after the authors found an error in their work. The journal published an updated version of the analysis with different conclusions, which the authors think could influence patient care.

The retracted paper, “Prioritising primary care patients with unexpected weight loss for cancer investigation: diagnostic accuracy study,” appeared Aug. 13, 2020. The researchers, led by Brian D. Nicholson, a general practitioner and associate professor in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford, England, used electronic health records data to look for people diagnosed with cancer within six months after a recording of unexpected weight loss.

The authors were attempting to replicate their results in another dataset when they found “some differences in the study findings and study population that we could not easily explain,” Nicholson told Retraction Watch. He continued:

Cancer specialist faked data in at least ten papers, VA and UCLA find

A multiple myeloma specialist “recklessly“ falsified data in at least 10 published articles, according to a joint investigation by the University of California, Los Angeles David Geffen School of Medicine and Veterans Affairs Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System.

The institutions found Alan Lichtenstein, a former staff physician at the VA, committed research misconduct by reusing images “to falsely represent the results” related to 26 pairs of experiments, according to a notice published in the Federal Register.

At least one of the sets of images in each of the pairs “is inaccurate,” the notice stated. The institutions found Lichtenstein had falsified data in “at least ten” of the 13 articles in which the images appeared, perhaps because the investigators could not determine which images, if any, were original.

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