Bribery offers from China rattle journal editors. Are they being scammed?

On November 12, Richard Addante, an associate editor at the journal Frontiers in Psychology, received an alarming email from someone purporting to be a faculty member at a university in China. 

“I have a lot of papers to publish, papers on computers, medicine, materials, and so on,” the email, signed by a “Wei Yang” of Zhengzhou College of Business and Industry, stated. “If you can help me publish my paper, I’ll pay you $1500 as a referral fee.” 

To Addante, a psychologist at Florida Institute of Technology, in Melbourne, the message suggested the field of scientific publishing needed a thorough clean-up.

“It was surprising to see such an obvious request for bribery, and the brazen nature of it led me to think that it may be a common practice for some, for which there was apparently no fear of repercussion,” Addante told us. 

A joint investigation by Science and Retraction Watch earlier this year found paper mills in China and elsewhere have been bribing editors and planting agents on editorial boards for years.

A long-known hotbed for paper mills, China has recently taken steps to curtail academic fraud. But observers say it remains business as usual there. “China’s scientific research evaluation system has not changed, and corruption in the system that may affect integrity has further increased,” said a sleuth in China, who tracks paper mills and requested anonymity for fear of retaliation by the government.

Addante alerted Frontiers to the bribery attempt, and also withdrew from editing a paper by researchers he believed were from the same school as the person who had emailed him. 

“When you have people offering bribes from one institution, it casts a gray cloud on everyone from that institution,” Addante said.

Other editors in the United States and Europe have also received bribery proposals from the same Chinese email account in recent weeks. On their LinkedIn pages, two university professors – one an editorial board member at PeerJ Computer Science and another an associate editor at Frontiers in Psychology – shared screenshots of emails similar to the one Addante received.

“Increasingly, academic journal editors are receiving payment offers to expedite the publication process,” Valeria Cavioni of Università Mercatorum in Rome wrote in her post.

But the Chinese emails contain a red flag: They appear to come from the domain of Zhengzhou Technology and Business University, a private school in China’s Henan province, although the signature at the bottom stated Yang was an associate professor at the School of Information Engineering at Zhengzhou College of Business and Industry. A Google search found no institution by that name. Similarly, a search for “Wei Yang” and “Zhengzhou Technology and Business University” came up empty.

An email we sent to the account at Zhengzhou Technology and Business University bounced, with a message stating the recipient didn’t exist. We also called the number in the signature, but it was not in service. When we called the School of Information Engineering at Zhengzhou Technology and Business University, we were told no one by the name “Wei Yang” worked there.

Meanwhile, internal emails we obtained show Frontiers is taking the emails seriously and has escalated the case to its research-integrity team. In one message from December 6, Sara Palermo, assistant specialty chief editor for neuropsychology at the publisher, wrote: 

I proceeded to make reports regarding these communications in recent weeks to the Editorial Offices. Corruption attempts are underway by several researchers based in China.

The journal Manager and the Executives are carrying out checks and flagging all the authors. Likewise, attempts will be made to dissuade AEs [associate editors] from accepting similar proposals.

In an emailed statement, the publisher told us:

Frontiers has no control over unscrupulous third parties who contact our editorial boards with unethical schemes. Any bribery attempts are clearly counter to all Frontiers’ research integrity policies and ethics. Our editors have the good sense to forward these messages to our attention and to ignore them. We are actively investigating, and in line with our investigation policies will contact the individual(s) and the institution(s) they claim affiliation with.

Addante acknowledged the Chinese email might not be what it seemed. “It could just be a phishing thing to get my bank account,” he said. “I mean, professors are famously naive and susceptible to stupidity.”

He added: 

Whether it’s fraud upon the scientific integrity of the review process and bribery, or whether it’s just preying upon vulnerable faculty to give their bank account numbers – either way, it’s fraud, and it’s fraud within the industry of science.

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