An engineering journal has retracted two papers after a company complained the authors of the articles used its software without a valid license.
Both retracted papers were published by Ain Shams Engineering Journal in the last couple of years by different authors based in Egypt. Both papers used FLOW-3D, software that is used to simulate the dynamics of liquids and gasses, which is developed by the firm Flow Science, Inc., in Santa Fe, N.M.
Tom Jensen, vice president of Flow Science, told Retraction Watch the firm offered the authors of both studies to legalize their version of the software by purchasing a license.
But the company didn’t receive a response, Jensen said, despite informing the researchers a retraction would be sought from the journal without a valid license. “We offer greatly reduced prices for licenses for academic institutions and we have numerous academic users around the world,” he added.
A spokesperson for Elsevier, which publishes Ain Shams Engineering Journal, said it is “each journal’s responsibility to check if software licences are valid.”
Jensen said the company came across the papers because it regularly conducts reviews of citations of its software on the internet. How the authors obtained the software in the first place is unclear, Jensen said, “but we are aware that cracked copies of our software (and many others) appear on the so-called ‘dark web’.”
This case is not the first time journals have been forced to pull articles for unlicensed uses of copyrighted work. In 2017, a scientist came under spotlight after asking for tens of thousands of dollars from researchers using his copyrighted questionnaire for research purposes, resulting in at least two teams withdrawing their papers instead of paying up. But a paper that helped form the basis of that questionnaire was retracted in 2023.
Both retraction notices, issued by the journal’s editor-in-chief, contain similar wording, including:
One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that the article does not violate any Intellectual Property rights of any person or entity and that the use of any software is made under a license or permission from the software owner.
One of the retracted studies, “Investigating the peak outflow through a spatial embankment dam breach,” which was originally published in November 2022, has been cited three times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. It was retracted in September 2023.
Retraction Watch reached out to Ashraf Jatwary, the corresponding author of the 2022 article, who is based at Zagazig University in Egypt, for a comment but didn’t hear back.
The other retracted study, “Effect of tailwater depth on non-cohesive earth dam failure due to overtopping,” was originally published in August 2023. It was pulled last month and has so far been cited 2 times.
We also contacted Shaimaa Aman and Rabiea Nasr of Alexandria University, both corresponding authors of this study, for a comment but didn’t receive a reply.
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Interesting. I can think of all kinds of appropriate consequences for misuse of a license like that, but retraction of the paper itself? Misuse of the license doesn’t suggest the underlying findings were wrong.
I guess the argument could be that 1) unauthorized versions of the software theoretically may not generate accurate results, but also 2) as was said in the notice, “One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that the article does not violate any Intellectual Property rights of any person or entity and that the use of any software is made under a license or permission from the software owner.” The journal does need to enforce the rules they have.
I tried to find data on the cost of licenses, but while they do offer free trials, they don’t seem to publish the license costs on their site. Better transparency from the company would help alleviate my suspicion that they may be extorting fees from people with bigger research budgets by making these particular authors suffer.
It’s concerning that the PDFs for both of these manuscripts are unreadable. Is the publisher trying to cover up more than a licensing dispute? Perhaps a more significant peer review problem occurred with these manuscripts.