Journal becomes “victim of an organized rogue editor network”

We’re not accustomed to seeing journal article titles that end in exclamation points. But that’s what a title did earlier this month: “The Journal of Nanoparticle Research victim of an organized rogue editor network!”

The journal, a Springer Nature title, wrote the editors, “has been attacked in a new way by a sophisticated and organized network.” (It turns out not to be entirely new, but more on that in a moment.) As the editors explain:

In September 2019, we received a proposal for a special issue on the “Role of Nanotechnology and Internet of Things in Healthcare.” We found the proposal very timely and exactly what we were looking for. The proposal was very well written and accompanied by a long list of possible contributors with affiliations and email addresses. The special issue was apparently proposed by eminent scientists in the field of computer science and engineering from well-established institutions in Germany and the UK. So far so good. [Nicola] Pinna [one of the journal’s editors] still remembers that as an email expert, he even checked the headers of the emails we received, which were apparently generated from the university accounts, and also noted that one more university had moved its email services from home hosted to Gmail (N.B. in the past few years almost all the universities in Anglo-Saxon countries have moved to Google or outlook.com mail services). We therefore accepted the proposal, created a special issue entry in our Editorial Manager system, and gave access to it to the three eminent academics to handle manuscripts.

The manuscripts began flowing in. Flooding, the editors write:

At first, we were quite happy that the special issue had attracted many submissions and interest from the community. However, when we started to look at the submissions, we rapidly noted that most of the manuscripts were of a low quality and/or did not fit with the topic of the special issue. Of course, we acted immediately, but it was already too late because 19 manuscripts among the 80 submissions had been already accepted and/or published.

The editors’ suspicions were raised:

We immediately started an internal investigation on all the submissions and directly found out that the supposed eminent academics who proposed the special issue had nothing to do with it. The organized group used these individuals’ names and their email addresses to hack and manipulate the peer review process. To be more precise, in August 2019, they bought some very similar domain names (presently expired) to the ones of the supposed university addresses. The only differences were “univ” instead of “uni” in one e-mail suffix and “-ac.uk” instead of “.ac.uk” in another. Of course, this is a trivial trick, and if we had checked deeply, we would have noticed that the domains were faked and that the emails should have had been generated from outlook.com (and not Gmail) in one case and directly from servers of the university network in the other.

Ah, the old faked emails trick, which has been responsible for many of the more than 900 fake peer review retractions we’ve tracked since 2011.

Who would have thought of such a thing? bemoaned the editors. As it turns out, the editor of another Springer Nature journal, Australasian Physical & Engineering Sciences in Medicine, wrote last year about being the victim of an identical scam. Pinna tells Retraction Watch the Journal of Nanoparticle Research team wasn’t aware of the Australasian journal’s editorial, nor of our post about it. To be fair, that probably wouldn’t have helped them prevent the scam, given the timing, but it might have saved them from calling it a “new way.”

The authors note:

We fear that the present case may be only the tip of the iceberg.

And they blame bad incentives:

At the Journal of Nanoparticle Research, we have now implemented more strict processes for avoiding this happening again, but this is definitely not enough to cope with the main problem from which the scientific literature has been suffering in the last few decades, that is, the exponential growth of scientific publications driven by the obligation for scientists in many countries to publish more and more, which leads to the publication of a huge background noise of useless and low-level articles. 

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