‘Galling’: Journal scammed by guest editor impersonator

It just keeps happening.

For at least the fourth time in two years, a journal has been scammed by someone impersonating a guest editor. The latest: Behaviour & Information Technology, a Taylor & Francis title, has retracted an entire special issue — at least 10 articles published between 2019 and 2020 — because the guest editor “was impersonated by a fraudulent entity.”

As the retraction notices for the 10 papers report:

After publication it came to our attention that the person named as the Guest Editor of the Special Issue was impersonated by a fraudulent entity and the articles were not reviewed fully in line with the journal’s peer review standards and policy. We did not find any evidence of misconduct by the authors. However, in order to ensure full assessment has been conducted, we sought expert advice on the validity and quality of the published articles from independent peer reviewers. Following this post publication peer review, the editor has determined that the articles do not meet the required scholarly standards to remain published in the journal, and therefore has taken the decision to retract the articles. The authors have been informed of this decision.

The journal did not name the impersonated guest editor, and the editor in chief, Panos Markopoulos, did not respond to our request for comment, instead forwarding it to Taylor & Francis. A Taylor & Francis spokesperson told Retraction Watch:

Behaviour and Information Technology has retracted all papers in this special issue at the request of the journal’s Editor-in-Chief. This is following the legitimacy of the Guest Editor coming into question during post-publication checks. This has been investigated and confirmed to be fraudulent. 

All authors have been informed during the process, and post-publication review has been conducted on all papers, overseen by the journal’s Editor-in-Chief. There is no indication that the authors were aware of the illegitimacy of the Guest Editor.

Whilst it’s galling anyone would consider impersonating a peer within the academic community in this way, post-publication safeguards picked this up and meant we were able to trigger a thorough investigation and resolution for everyone who has unfortunately been affected by this.

Asked if the publisher would identify the impersonated editor, the spokesperson said:

In the interests of privacy, and because this hasn’t been pleasant for anyone involved I’m afraid we’re not going to provide the name.

It’s unclear what motivates impersonators — money? coerced citations? — who have struck at least three other journals since 2019 and another in 2016. A dozen retractions from Current Psychology, a Springer Nature title, suggest that it, too, was the victim of rogue editors.

Here’s how the scam works, according to Jamie Trapp, who described it to us in late 2019 after someone tried to dupe his journal:

In the proposal, the bio’s and links to the impersonated researcher’s online profiles are used, which are real. The only difference is that the email addresses used have slight changes from that of the real researcher being impersonated (e.g. a.researcher@themoonuniversity.com might be changed to a.researcher@themoomuniversity.com ). Therefore, any correspondence using the fake email address, or any reply to the original email goes to the impersonators.

If the proposal is accepted, then the special issue announcement goes ahead, linked to the bio’s of real researchers, but with the announcement inadvertently using the faked email address. From this point onwards, the fraudsters have a valid special issue announcement, in a real journal, but using their fake email address.

Presumably, interested authors will then contact via the given email addresses, at which time the fraudsters can then advise the authors to submit manuscripts and coerce fees (or whatever) for the privilege. Perhaps they might even go so far as to set up a fake online manuscript submission form.

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