The website for Springer Journals Online, an agency offering authorship slots in articles in exchange for payment, has gone offline, four days after Retraction Watch published its investigation into its activities.
As we reported on Monday, the agency was soliciting researchers offering services that included securing authorship in research articles intended for journals published by Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley and SAGE, among others.
Springer Journals Online did not immediately respond to a request for comment by email asking why the website was unavailable, if it had halted operations, or if it wished to address our previous story. No one answered calls made via WhatsApp.
The agency uses an obviously similar name to Springer Nature, one of the world’s largest academic publishers. A spokesperson for Springer Nature told Retraction Watch that the publisher had no connection to the agency and said they were “working with the relevant authorities to address this issue.”
There was an update to the “springerjournalsonline.net” domain dated October 16, but it’s not clear from the domain record what that update was or if it’s responsible for the website outage. Retraction Watch could not determine if the agency has completely ceased operating or if it is continuing operations through other channels.
In August, Richard Fateman, a retired computer scientist from the University of California, Berkeley, received an email offering authorship in an article in exchange for a share of the publication costs. The offer prompted an investigation into the agency’s operations and their use of established publishers’ and researchers’ names to solicit researchers.
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