A Sage journal that holds the distinction of highest number of retracted articles in the Retraction Watch Database likely made in excess of $400,000 in revenue from those papers, by our calculations.
We reported in April that the Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems (JIFS) had retracted 1,561 articles as part of a cleanup operation on likely paper mill activity. The journal, which Sage acquired in November 2023 when it bought IOS Press, had previously retracted a batch of 49 articles in October 2021. That brings its retraction total up to 1,610.
Commenters on the April article pointed out the journal charges a fee for all accepted papers; separate fees apply for open access. We followed up on that with a few questions for Sage.
“Publication charges apply to a very small number of our journals,” Laura West, corporate communications & public affairs manager for Sage, told us by email. “These fees are typically in place either because the journal was acquired with an existing publication charge model or, in a few cases, due to society requirements.” She pointed us to Sage’s page and publication charges policy, which includes a list of the journals charging a fee.
The current publication fee for JIFS is €300 / US$300. We found previous years’ publication charges on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Putting that information together with the number of retracted articles by publication year means the journal made $427,850 off of papers it later retracted.
| Year | Publication year of retracted papers | Total research articles published* | Retracted articles as % of total | Author fee (USD)** | Revenue from retracted articles |
| 2014 | 4 | 546 | 0.73% | unknown | |
| 2015 | 5 | 572 | 0.87% | unknown | |
| 2016 | 4 | 574 | 0.70% | 150 | $600 |
| 2017 | 43 | 735 | 5.85% | 150 | $6,450 |
| 2018 | 35 | 919 | 3.81% | 150 | $5,250 |
| 2019 | 133 | 1232 | 10.80% | 150 | $19,950 |
| 2020 | 95 | 1367 | 6.95% | 250 | $23,750 |
| 2021 | 65 | 1509 | 4.31% | 250 | $16,250 |
| 2022 | 244 | 965 | 25.28% | 250 | $61,000 |
| 2023 | 502 | 1494 | 33.60% | 300 | $150,600 |
| 2024 | 480 | 843 | 56.94% | 300 | $144,000 |
| Total: | 1610 | 10756 | 14.97% | $427,850 |
**per Wayback Machine; 2018–2019 weren’t available so are estimates using lowest likely fee
West pointed out that “Most of the fees related to these articles were collected before the journal was acquired by Sage and under the previous publisher’s policies and procedures.”
We asked whether Sage has considered donating the revenue from retracted papers to charity, as IOP Publishing has done. Its donations go to Research4Life, which provides low- and middle-income countries with online access to academic and professional peer-reviewed content.
West didn’t address donations specifically. She said:
The fees collected since coming to Sage have contributed to investments into tools and processes to strengthen research integrity and uphold standards across our journals. For example, on transition to Sage, we made investments to strengthen editorial and research integrity processes on JIFS and to curate its archive, including the investigation we recently completed. We’ve also recently expanded our support of Research4Life amongst other annual contributions.
Another commenter pointed out the editorial board page for the journal was empty. West told us the publisher “is in advanced discussions with a new editor,” and will work with them to reform the editorial board this year. “In the meantime, the journal is being managed by Sage staff who are PhD level subject experts,” she said.
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Nice work. 👍