A building consultant rigs peer review

The construction industry in New York City is notorious for rigged bids, but rigged peer review? 

A Queens, NY, building consultant has lost four papers for forging — or having had forged — the peer reviews of his manuscripts. (For background on how this works, read this.)

Faruque Hossain’s articles appeared in a variety of engineering-based Elsevier publications between 2017 and 2019. Hossain is listed as being the owner of an outfit called Green Globe Technology Inc., which is based in Flushing. 

Here’s the notice for “Green science: Decoding dark photon structure to produce clean energy,” which Energy Reports published in 2018: 

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief.

After a thorough investigation, the Editor has concluded that the acceptance of this article was based upon the positive advice of one illegitimate reviewer report. The report was submitted from an email account which was provided to the journal as a suggested reviewer during the submission of the article. Although purportedly a real reviewer account, the Editor has concluded that this was not of an appropriate, independent reviewer.

This manipulation of the peer-review process represents a clear violation of the fundamentals of peer review, our publishing policies, and publishing ethics standards. Apologies are offered to the readers of the journal that this deception was not detected during the submission process.

That’s similar (or halfway, at least) to the statement the journal issued last year for another of Hossain’s articles, titled “Theoretical mechanism to breakdown of photonic structure to design a micro PV panel”:

After a thorough investigation, the Editor has concluded that the acceptance of this article was partly based upon the positive advice of two illegitimate reviewer reports. The reports were submitted from email accounts which were provided to the journal as suggested reviewers during the submission of the article. Although purportedly real reviewer accounts, the Editor has concluded that these were not of appropriate, independent reviewers.

Hossain also lost a 2019 paper in Energy and Buildings, “Green Technology: Thermal control of solar energy to cool and heat the building naturally,” for reasons unstated: 

This article has been withdrawn at the request of the author(s) and/or editor. The Publisher apologizes for any inconvenience this may cause.

Hossain’s affiliation for that paper was the School of Architecture and Construction Management at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. 

Hossain has not responded to a request for comment.

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