Earlier this year, China’s supreme court said companies selling fake or low-quality research papers should be punished. But shady middlemen there continue to offer questionable deals to journal editors across the globe in a bid to secure publications for their customers, emails obtained by Retraction Watch suggest.
In the emails, sent between May and August and using the same boilerplate language, the Nanjing-based agency A-Techo said it would pay an “expedited processing fee” of $500 to $1,000 US “per accepted manuscript to support the review process.”
According to its website, the company provides various types of publication support. Signatures in the correspondence we obtained listed different names of purported assistant editors, who said they were “writing on behalf of an academic institution that supports Ph.D. researchers and faculty in publishing high-quality research.”
Some journals allow authors to pay a fee to fast-track the editorial processing of their manuscripts. But when A-Techo’s proposition landed in the inbox of Ilka Agricola, an editor of the Journal of the European Mathematical Society, she had no doubt about the underlying motive.
“It was clear to me that the ‘fast-track fee’ was a euphemism for ‘bribe,’” she told us, adding that fast-tracking is “unheard of” in mathematics. “The offer was to accept a low-quality paper for money, which would never have been accepted otherwise, in the hope that nobody would notice.”
Agricola, a professor at the Philipp University of Marburg, in Germany, and chair of the International Mathematical Union’s Committee on Publishing, said the entire editorial boards ”of at least two journals” had received emails from A-Techo within “a few days.”
”I was outraged by how brazen some of the fraudsters in this business have become, and so were my colleagues,” she told us.
A-Techo also targeted journals in environmental conservation science and political science with similar offers, according to emails we have seen.
Bribery is nothing new in academic publishing. A joint investigation by Retraction Watch and Science Magazine last year found a paper mill in China had paid tens of thousands of dollars in kickbacks to international editors who accepted its manuscripts. And in December, we wrote about a journal editor in the United States who had received a bribery offer that also appeared to come from China. A sting by an academic and a blogger earlier this year provided more detail about how these furtive agencies operate.
Based on its website, A-Techo, sometimes written A-Tech, appears to be a full-fledged paper mill, offering “End-to-end support for your publication journey, from manuscript preparation to post-publication promotion.” But there are several red flags. For instance, the site uses stock images purporting to be of staff. It also features dubious testimonials from happy customers such as ”Dr. Sarah Johnson,” who is described as a ”research scientist” at Stanford University. At least one real person with a Ph.D. is named Sarah Johnson and works as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford, but she told us she had never used A-Techo’s services and the image provided was not of her. A Google Lens search showed it was also a stock photo.
Reached for comment at its Nanjing number, a representative of the firm who identified himself only as ”John” said, ”What we’re actually looking for is that some journals offer some expeditious [sic] review.”
He said the company was “not looking for” editors “to just accept our papers or something,” but simply wanted to know if the journals had “some system that they can review the papers faster.”
But last year, David Wood, a professor at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, who edits several accounting journals, had an exchange on LinkedIn suggesting A-Techo’s tactics are less savory than the company would like them to appear.
As Wood wrote in the LinkedIn post in December, he was contacted by an individual whose profile described him as a research assistant at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology.
”We do not want to submit articles through the traditional process. We seek confirmation that our articles will be accepted by your journal, as we have many manuscripts ready for submission,” the person told Wood. ”For each article, we will pay an additional expedited review fee of 1,000 USD( Can be negotiate).”
Wood also included the text of one of the LinkedIn posts from the person who had contacted him, a ”Mizanur Rashid”: “I’m reaching out on behalf of a cultural exchange organization […] that has helped over 18,000 research articles from top Chinese universities get published in respected journals worldwide,” the post began. “We’re looking to partner with journal editors to publish high-quality research across different fields.”
The domain name of the contact email address provided was “a-techo.org.”
”Pay-to-publish schemes taint not only the perception of objectivity but very likely objectivity itself,” Wood told us. ”Such providers should work with journal owners, not individual editors. Journal owners can then decide what is best for their journals and communicate that policy transparently to all members. There should be no back-office deals that give one group an unfair advantage over another.”
As Wood noted in an update on LinkedIn, both Rashid and Nanjing University later contacted him to say Rashid’s account had been ”hijacked” by ”someone not associated with the” institution.
Asked for comment on Wood’s post, A-Techo’s “John” said he hadn’t heard about it and asked for more information. We sent several emails with links to the post and also messaged the company on WhatsApp, but never received a response.
Whether for-profit publishing, in particular charging publication fees, is inherently at odds with good science has long been a matter of debate.
“However, accepting papers in exchange for a fee without peer review compromises the integrity of scholarly publishing and disregards established peer review practices within the research community, regardless of the review model applied,” said Loreta Tauginienė of Kaunas University of Technology, in Lithuania, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Academic Ethics.
Tauginienė, who is also a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics Council, told us “legal measures against paper mills should be envisaged. Precedents for such practice already exist; for example, administrative penalties are imposed on paper mills in Lithuania, and their websites are banned in Australia.”
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I also got that email.