A company that had offered payment for citations of articles in various journals has ended the practice, and fired the staffer it said was responsible, following reporting by Retraction Watch.
On August 31, we reported that Innoscience Innoscience Research, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, was offering $6 per citation of papers in five different journals, and up to five cites, or $30, per paper, or $150 in total across all five journals. Since then, two journals have distanced themselves from the scheme.
Yesterday, Innoscience told us by email:
We have received your question about the article.According to your question to do some handle. Here we attached Letter of termination Ashley Jia director position & official website statement – apologies for Article Citations screenshot to your refer.
Since we are less exposed to this type of work, we apologize for the mistakes we made.For your note this citation policy has been discontinued.
We’re all aware of what happened and will take extra care in the future. We promise to be more careful. Here we will review and improve in light of this mistake. Thank you for your supervision and notification. In the future, please continue to monitor so that we can make improvements. Thank you very much.
In the statement on the site, labeled “APOLOGY FOR ARTICLE CITATIONS,” the company writes:
Retraction Watch pointed out in a report on August 31 that Innoscience Research paid funding to increase the citation index of journals. Innoscience research sincerely recognized the mistake, and had immediately terminated the relevant provisions on September 2. We sincerely apologized for the negative impact on the journals and would like to express our gratitude to Retraction Watch for its supervision at the same time.Innoscience Research will inform the employees who do not strictly implement the academic standards to bear the responsibilities, and carry out more strict training and appraisals for all employees.
1. The person responsible for issuing the policy without the approval of the editorial board and authorization of the publisher shall be dismissed.
2. Innoscience Research would like to reiterate sincere apology for the negative impact on relevant journals and publishers.
3. Innoscience Research will resolutely maintain the professionalism and preciseness and welcome the strict supervision of the academia.
We will strictly abide by the laws and regulations and operate legally and reasonably in the future development.
The company also asked us to make a presentation to them on research integrity:
Finally,we will prepare to conduct strict academic standards training. We would like to invite you to an exclusive presentation to give us a lecture on the synthesis of academic standards related training, it will help us improve our mistakes even more. I can assure you that we’ll make everything as convenient as possible for the speaker.
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Good that they are requesting RW to educate the staff on research integrity. “Innoscience” – literally they appear to be innocent about research integrity. They should also take note that solicitation emails should be scrutinised as well. If you want training on that, i can provide.