The Saveetha Institute of Medical and Technical Sciences in India has been on our radar for a while. So when we got word the university’s channel on an open access journal platform disappeared, we were curious what might be going on.
Just this year, we reported Saveetha was among 14 universities with “questionable publication practices,” defined as unusually fast growth in research output, as measured by published journal articles.
Our 2023 investigation into Saveetha’s dental school uncovered an elaborate self-citation scheme: Undergraduates write manuscripts as part of their exams; student and faculty reviewers then insert scores of citations to papers by Saveetha faculty to inflate the university’s citation rankings.
That year we also reported the school offered an adjunct position — and payment — to a prominent economist in exchange for adding his Saveetha affiliation to his papers.
Last year, we reported on the flood of low quality, AI-generated commentaries overwhelming journals’ manuscript pipeline. Our investigation found Saveetha authors had published more than 1,200 letters, comments and editorials in 2024, a ninefold increase from the year before. And Saveetha topped the list of author affiliations on retracted papers from Neurosurgical Review, a Springer Nature title working to clear its catalog of AI-generated articles.
Given what our past reporting turned up, when bibliometrics expert Reese Richardson wrote to tell us the Saveetha’s channel at Cureus, part of Springer Nature, has disappeared, it seemed worth a closer look.
Channels on the publishing platform enable “channel members to publish peer-reviewed articles, as well as post meeting abstracts, posters, announcements and other content produced by channel members, staff, residents, and/or students,” according to a guide on the Cureus website. Institutions pay a fee to have a Cureus channel.
So, did Cureus take down Saveetha’s channel for all its ties to questionable citation practices? Did the publisher audit all channels and remove those with unusual activity?
The response from a Cureus spokesperson:
The channel was closed on March 18th because of non-payment of fees. No other channels were removed.
Saveetha didn’t pay its bill.
But Richardson, who’s at Northwestern University and worked with us on the 2024 investigation, maintains there should be more quality control on Cureus’ part:
Cureus’ response implies that had Saveetha continued to pay their fee, they would have kept their channel. This suggests profound inattentiveness towards publication ethics by Cureus and, by extension, Springer Nature. Saveetha has been implicated in systematic abuses of publication ethics and integrity many times now, including through this backdoor channel in Cureus. Cureus’ channel system should be dismantled entirely, especially if Cureus will continue to allow universities gaming their metrics to appoint their own editorial officers so long as they pay their fees on time.
We did not get a response to our request for comment sent to the email address on an archived version of Saveetha’s Cureus channel.
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They didn’t pay the fee as Cureus isnt Indexed any more and hence publications in cureus are of no use to the organization