Last year, we wrote about a Walsh Medical Media journal that refused to withdraw an author’s paper unless he paid a fee — even though he didn’t write or submit the article. For one reader, some details of that story were familiar.
Laertis Ikonomou, an associate professor at the University of Buffalo in New York, discovered last September he was listed as an author on a commentary he had never seen before that had been published in the Journal of Carcinogenesis & Mutagenesis. He immediately requested the journal remove the article, and, like our previous story, the journal demanded a fee to do so. But after a few exchanges, the journal just changed the author on the paper to a different name.
The Journal of Carcinogenesis & Mutagenesis is one of 77 published by Walsh Medical Media. The publisher calls itself a “global leader” in open access publishing and, although it bills itself as a healthcare publishing company, has journals with specialties ranging from chemical engineering, coastal zone management, and intellectual property rights, as we have previously reported.
In a 2024 article in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing, Graham Kendall, the deputy vice chancellor at MILA University in Nilai, Malaysia, detailed possible connections between Walsh Medical Media and the publishing group OMICS. In 2019, OMICS was ordered to pay the U.S. government $50 million in 2019 for “unfair and deceptive practices.”
The Journal of Carcinogenesis & Mutagenesis lists an impact factor of 3.02, despite not being indexed by Clarivate’s Web of Science. None of Walsh Medical Media’s journals are covered by Scopus, although Journal of Carcinogenesis & Mutagenesis lists a CiteScore, a citation metric developed by Elsevier, on its website. The journal is listed in Cabells’ Predatory Reports for violations of its criteria on integrity and peer review, among others.
Ikonomou emailed the journal on September 23 requesting the removal of the article and also asked for an explanation for “how this submission was accepted given the fake email address and affiliation.”
On October 6, a representative from the publisher named Dwayne Harrison emailed back saying the journal would need a “confirmation regarding the withdrawal charges,” telling Ikonomou he would have to pay a fee.
When Ikonomou requested clarity on the fee, Harrison responded: “without the publication fee we can’t remove the article. So kindly make a payment of 400 Euros and clear it. Otherwie [sic] let me know, how much you will be ready to pay,” Harrison wrote.
In another email sent November 10, the same day, Harrison said: “Atleast try to make 499 Euros will remove the article from the website.” Four hundred euros is equivalent to about $463, and 499 euros is about $578.
Rui Amaral Mendes, whose name appears as one of the three co-editors-in-chief of the journal, told Ikonomou in November his name was being used “against my will” and that he had never been associated with the journal. In emails we have seen, Mendes, a researcher at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, reached out to someone at the journal in 2020 to request his name be removed from the editorial board. Mendes told us the journal did not respond.
Neither of the other two editors-in-chief responded to our emails asking if they were associated with the journal or not. An email sent to the publisher’s listed email address went unanswered.
The author now listed on the paper in the Journal of Carcinogenesis & Mutagenesis is Teresa Partmans, from the Hospital del Mar Research Institute in Barcelona. We couldn’t find a record of her on the institute’s page, and the institute did not respond when we asked if someone by that name was a researcher there. Aside from this paper, there is no publication record for a researcher by that name.
“There may be a widespread pattern of researcher name misuse by this predatory publisher,” Ikonomou said.
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