‘Article broker’ in China trying to hook journal editors with fishy publishing deals

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.”

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Weekend reads: ‘Europe’s largest paper mill?’; the ‘Paper Mill Iceberg’ of cancer research; why is Trump gutting research integrity agencies?

Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 60,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Continue reading Weekend reads: ‘Europe’s largest paper mill?’; the ‘Paper Mill Iceberg’ of cancer research; why is Trump gutting research integrity agencies?

Iraqi university dean linked to paper mills has more than a dozen retractions

Yasser Fakri Mustafa

A professor of pharmaceutical chemistry in Iraq has been steadily racking up retractions since 2022, with reasons ranging from authorship manipulation to irrelevant citations, peer review-by-author and not providing study data upon request.

Yasser Fakri Mustafa, who is also dean of the College of Pharmacy at the University of Mosul and editor-in-chief of the Iraqi Journal of Pharmacy, now has at least 16 retractions to his name, and more are likely to follow. One publisher told us it is actively investigating Mustafa’s work, and 81 of his more than 500 papers have been flagged on PubPeer.

From 2008 to 2019, Mustafa published no more than one or two articles a year, and often he had no output at all, according to the research database Dimensions. Then his output rose sharply, peaking at 120 in 2022, according to Dimensions. That same year, however, the researcher’s name appeared in a blog post by Nick Wise and Alexander Magazinov about authorship-for-sale networks. The two sleuths had found several papers by Mustafa and a slew of international coauthors that matched authorship ads on various websites, including that of a Russia-linked paper mill in Latvia, as they documented on PubPeer.

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New COPE retraction guidelines address paper mills, third parties, and more

Be-Art/iStock

New retraction guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics include more specific details about when to retract a paper, many of which address paper mill activity. For instance, journals should retract articles when “authorship of the publication cannot be verified or there are serious concerns about accountability for the research,” according to the updated guidance, released today. 

COPE also recommends retracting papers with “any form of misrepresentation,” including “deception; fraud (eg, a paper mill); identity theft or fictitious authorship; or undisclosed involvement of artificial intelligence (AI).” 

The organization has also released a new, separate guidance for expressions of concern. Both documents reiterate the as-soon-as-possible timeframe for notices and give more specific details on what information should be included in each type of notice.

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Guest post: In the name of Scopus, one hijacked journal easily tricks authors

Mahmood Anwar

Editor’s note: Mahmood Anwar is a former business management professor of the National Research University in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. In the course of his research, he keeps an eye out for flawed articles, he told Retraction Watch. He currently mentors 10 to 15 researchers who found him through his YouTube channel, where he discusses research ethics and explains study methods. In his own research, Anwar has covered topics such as feminism in the New Testament and smartphone use and short term memory. Anwar is also on the editorial board for Emerald Publishing’s VILAKSHAN – XIMB Journal of Management and International Journal of Management, Economics & Social Sciences. (Neither journal is indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science.) 

Aside from his research activities, Anwar also founded “Drive in Malaysia,” the country’s “First-ever Traffic Rules & Test Site,” according to the website. In addition to providing road safety education, the company has an independent review board. Anwar says the IRB was formed to approve research internally among the five members of the IRB committee, and most of the studies they review cover social sciences and road safety. 

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‘Tin Man Syndrome,’ five other case studies retracted following Retraction Watch coverage

A comparison of the images and an overlay, provided by a sleuth.

A journal has retracted a study on ‘Tin Man Syndrome’ plagiarized from a decade-old April Fools’ joke —  which the author now admits was fake.

On August 15, we wrote about a “rare case report” published in Medicine in which authors claimed they had encountered a case of “ectopia cordis interna” and described an asymptomatic man with his heart located in his abdomen. Sleuths believed the case report plagiarized images from a 2015 satirical paper describing a condition of the same name. 

A week later on August 22, Medicine, published by Wolters Kluwer, retracted the paper and five others — all published this year — with shared authors. None of the papers have been cited, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

The retracted papers are:

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Papers continue to face retractions for failure to license pricy tool 

Donald Morisky

Two journals have retracted papers this year for unauthorized use of a controversial scale whose creator has been known to license use of the questionnaire for six-figure sums – and to aggressively pursue those payments from researchers he claims have misused the instrument without prior approval.  

The Morisky Medication Adherence Scale (MMAS) is named for its creator, Donald Morisky,  now a professor emeritus in community health at UCLA. As the name implies, the measure allows researchers to assess patients’ adherence to drug regimens.

Morisky made a business out of licensing the scale and demanding steep fees for researchers who failed to obtain the proper permissions, as we reported in Science in 2017. Researchers who cannot afford the payments Morisky and his business associate demand have been forced to retract their work.

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Weekend reads: Lawyer sues to retract Paxil paper; most retracted papers have ‘negligible scholarly impact’; the high costs of freely available research

Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 60,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Continue reading Weekend reads: Lawyer sues to retract Paxil paper; most retracted papers have ‘negligible scholarly impact’; the high costs of freely available research

Embattled journal Cureus halts peer reviewer suggestions

The mega-journal Cureus is eliminating author suggestions for peer reviewers, a prompt that is standard practice at some journals when submitting a manuscript. 

According to an email sent August 25 to current and past peer reviewers, the move is “due to the potential conflict of interest” that comes from authors suggesting reviewers who may be mentors and colleagues. 

Reviewers recommended by authors are more likely to give positive feedback on papers. And such recommendations gave way to such practices as peer review rings and self-peer review, vulnerabilities that started to thrive more than a decade ago. 

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Exclusive: Cancer researcher sues MD Anderson over misconduct finding

Sonia Melo

A biochemist who worked as a postdoc at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston has sued the institution to dispute findings of research misconduct. 

The researcher, Sonia Melo, now at the University of Porto in Portugal, alleges MD Anderson did not follow its own policies while conducting its investigation. Melo lost a prestigious grant in 2016 after one of her papers was retracted for containing duplicated images. 

MD Anderson’s investigation concerned a paper published in Cancer Cell in 2014. On August 7 the journal marked it with a “temporary Expression of Concern” detailing duplicated and relabeled data found in the probe, which was completed in May 2024. The article has been cited 1,462 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

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