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.”
The embattled mega journal Cureus has closed six of its so-called “academic channels,” which it bills as low-cost publication platforms that “will turn your organization into a publishing powerhouse,” Retraction Watch has learned.
The move follows a joint investigation in May by Science and Retraction Watch that found several organizations critics described as dressed-up paper mills had their own channels at the medical journal.
As we reported in September, indexing for Cureus, which is published by Springer Nature, was recently put on hold by Clarivate’s Web of Science, apparently due to quality concerns.
A controversial rocket scientist in India earned his fourth retraction in October after an investigation at a physics journal found a core part of his work was “inaccurate and paradoxical.”
At issue is a highly technical concept developed by V.R. Sanal Kumar, a professor of aerospace engineering at Amity University in New Delhi. Other scientists have denounced the concept, which Kumar has dubbed “Sanal flow choking,” as “absolute nonsense,” as we reported in April.
Last year, a researcher at a U.S. university received an email offering what the subject line described as a “great opportunity to publish an article.”
The author of the email, Mahdi Shariati, an adjunct professor of civil engineering at Ton Duc Thang University, in Vietnam, said he had read one of the researcher’s papers and was impressed by its quality. “It would be an honor for me to collaborate with you and jointly present your remarkable work,” Shariati added.
The sudden death of a 27-year-old woman in the Romania offices of MDPI, a major open-access publisher with a worldwide presence, has grabbed national headlines and raised questions about the conditions under which the firm’s employees work.
Local newsreports said the woman had initially fainted in MDPI’s Bucharest office on Friday, October 4, but that her superiors refused to call an ambulance or let her go home after she revived. She later collapsed again and died from a heart attack after efforts to resuscitate her failed, according to the reports.
But in an interview with Retraction Watch, a colleague of the deceased woman, identified as Maria Alexandra Anghel, contested the media’s account of events.
Year after year, a husband-and-wife team at a university in Iran has been publishing studies involving research on cell lines ostensibly purchased from the Pasteur Institute of Iran, in Tehran.
But the couple may never have been in possession of the cells. In correspondence obtained by Retraction Watch, the Pasteur Institute told their employer, Jahrom University of Medical Sciences, only three of the many cell lines described in their publications had been available at the national cell bank over the past decade.
A physiatrist in Italy has lost four publications this year after two groups of researchers raised concerns about his research.
The physician, Marco Monticone, a professor at the University of Cagliari, had three papers pulled in 2022, as we reported at the time. Those retractions followed a critique by Cochrane researchers who analyzed data in 10 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) headed by Monticone.
Neil O’Connell, of Brunel University of London, lead author of the critique, told us:
Web of Science, Clarivate’s influential database of abstracts and citations, has paused indexation of new content from the open-access journals Heliyon and Cureus, apparently due to concerns about the quality of their articles.
Indexation in WoS or Scopus, another major bibliometric database owned by Elsevier, has become an important stamp of approval for scholarly publications worldwide and can make or break a journal.
WoS is “making a big call here, taking aim at two of the mega-journals that have grown massively in recent years,” said Nick Wise, a scientific sleuth and a researcher at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. “WoS appears to be one of the only organisations with the power to compel big publishers to act. I don’t think that’s a sign of a healthy academic publishing system, but it’s how things are currently.”
An architecture journal’s “failure to act in a timely and proactive manner” in a case of plagiarism in a now-retracted review article has sparked the resignation of a member of its editorial board, Retraction Watch has learned.
“I am appalled that it took, essentially, from November 2022 until now, September 2024, to resolve what was a fairly straightforward matter,” Dirk H. R. Spennemann, of Charles Sturt University in Albury, Australia, wrote in a Sept. 18, 2024, email to the editor-in-chief of Buildings, an MDPI title.
But in June of that year, Marco Spada, a senior lecturer in architecture at the University of Suffolk in the United Kingdom, informed Buildings the work borrowed heavily from two previous publications without proper citation. Although many sentences had been reworded using synonyms, the plagiarism was extensive and obvious.
Spada had recognized the article, a version of which he had previously reviewed – and rejected – as a referee for Sustainability, a different MDPI journal. Elements such as the title, the order in which the authors appeared and some of the abstract had changed, Spada told us. But it was still the same paper.
“Clearly they managed to outsmart the system,” Spada said.
According to information on the website of EMH Swiss Medical Publishers, the Swiss Medical Association FMH holds a 55% stake in the firm. But on Aug. 22, 2024, the FMH’s board terminated its collaboration with the publishing house, including licensing for the association’s journal Schweizerische Ärztezeitung(Swiss Medical Journal), with immediate effect.
“In doing so, [the association] deprived its own company of its livelihood. EMH filed its balance sheet today and thus opened bankruptcy proceedings,” the publisher said in a notice posted on its website on September 4, 2024.
