In a story readers might find familiar, a researcher was asked to pay when he demanded a journal retract an article he had never seen but supposedly wrote — and the journal ghosted him when he refused.
In February, Evgenios Agathokleous, an environmental resources researcher at Nanjing University in China, asked Prime Scholars’ European Journal of Experimental Biology to retract a 2023 article that listed him as the sole author. In his email to the journal, he said he had never seen the paper and asked the journal to remove it and publish a formal retraction notice.
Two days later, a Prime Scholars representative named Nina responded, telling Agathokleous “your article has already been successfully published in our journal in accordance with the company’s publication norms and policies.” Nina then asked Agathokleous to pay 519 euros, the equivalent of roughly $600, which they said “covers the costs associated with publication handling, indexing preparation, and database maintenance.”
Agathokleous refused, and hasn’t heard from the publisher since, despite repeated attempts to get the journal to retract the article.
In 2022, Prime Scholars published articles in its British Journal of Research it claimed were written by William Faulkner, Walt Whitman and Charlotte Brontë, among other literary legends. Those articles remain online.
The journal is listed in Cabells’ Predatory Reports, along with 50 other Prime Scholars publications, for violations of its criteria on peer review, among others.
The ISSN for the journal is registered in India. However, the mailing address for the publisher is the same as that for Walsh Medical Media — a publisher that recently held a paper hostage in a similar manner.
The European Journal of Experimental Biology was formerly published by Pelagia Research Library, according to the journal’s archived volumes. Pelagia Research Library has been tied to OMICS, a publisher who was asked to pay the U.S. government $50 million for “unfair and deceptive practices.” As we wrote last year, Walsh Medical Media also has ties to OMICS.
One of the listed editors is “Hugo Val, Research professor” at the State University of Amazonas in Brazil. We could not find any record of that university — although University of the State of Amazonas and Amazonas State University are both institutions in Brazil — nor could we identify a biochemist or bacteriologist named Hugo Val.
Hamed Kioumarsi, a researcher at the Agricultural Research, Education and Extension Organization in Iran, is also listed as an editor. Kioumarsi’s LinkedIn profile lists his editorial positions at several other journals but does not mention the European Journal of Experimental Biology. He responded to our email asking whether he was affiliated with the journal with: “Dear editor, Thank you for reaching out. I have no problem with this.” He did not respond when we clarified that we were contacting him as journalists, not as representatives from the journal.
A representative from Prime Scholars responded to our email, stating they forwarded our question to “our respective team and soon they will resolve it.” Our message to the email address listed on the European Journal of Experimental Biology’s website went unanswered.
The publication ethics statement on the journal’s website states the European Journal of Experimental Biology follows “International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) principles on the way to affect acts of misconduct thereby committing to research allegations of misconduct to make sure the integrity of research [sic].”
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