by publisher – Retraction Watch

Buying a first author slot can cost you anywhere from $56 to $5,600

The market for fake authorship on a research paper has prices to match every budget, according to a new dataset compiled from thousands of advertisements on social media platforms and paper mill websites.

The dataset, called BuyTheBy, is the first systematic attempt to understand the market for paper mill products, according to its creators. It compiles more than 18,000 text-based advertisements from seven paper mills operating across India, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Latvia, Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan, collected at various points between March 2020 to April 2026. The researchers found prices vary widely depending on geography, ranging from $56 to $5,631 for a first author slot, according to a preprint submitted to arXiv.

Several of the advertisements appear to correspond with published papers subsequently published in the targeted journals, with identical titles to those advertised. But cracking down on the industry with datasets such as these will be difficult, some experts say, especially as the business model evolves rapidly with AI.

Another retraction and two investigations for chemist

A chemist in Austria who earned a retraction earlier this year is under investigation by his former university, a national research integrity agency and the publisher Elsevier, Retraction Watch has learned, while scrutiny of his publication record has broadened to include more papers flagged on PubPeer.

Maximilian Lackner, a technical chemist and process engineer at FH Technikum Wien in Austria until October last year, according to his ORCID profile, was the senior and corresponding author on a paper in npj Science of Food retracted in January after publishers discovered the five of the cited references weren’t relevant to the claims they were meant to be supporting. The 2024 article has been cited 90 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Editors also pointed out the information in a flow diagram for selecting studies didn’t appear anywhere else in the article. One of the authors, Fatemeh Ahmadi of the University of Western Australia, told the journal she and Lackner disagreed with the retraction. When we asked why, Ahmadi said the authors were “not interested” in our request for further information.

45 editors resign from math journal, former EIC calls Elsevier publisher a ‘mini-dictator’

Forty-five of 48 members of the editorial board of the Journal of Approximation Theory resigned earlier this month for what they called Elsevier’s “concerning and potentially detrimental” decisions regarding the publication.

Paul Nevai, formerly a professor at The Ohio State University, was appointed editor-in-chief of JAT in 1990 and held the position for 35 years until December. That’s when he reached the end of his term and Elsevier informed him they’d be filling the position with someone else.

The mass resignation came after what Nevai said were several years of bad blood between the editors of the journal (including him) and the publisher, Giampiero Accardo. A representative for Elsevier told us designated publishers like Accardo are Elsevier employees who “oversee a portfolio of academic journals within a subject area, working closely with editors, authors, and research communities to support their development and long-term success.”

“Game-changer” breast cancer study retracted as Indiana researcher out of his post

A group of cancer researchers whose work has been questioned by sleuths has been hit with their third retraction in less than a year.

Today, Science Translational Medicine (STM) withdrew a 2021 breast cancer study by former Indiana University researcher Yujing Li and 12 other authors for image falsification. The immunotherapy study had been described by senior author Xiongbin Lu as a “game-changer” for triple negative breast cancer in a 2021 IU press release.

The paper’s April 15 retraction notice states that a joint research misconduct investigation involving Indiana University, The Ohio State University, and the University of Maryland, College Park determined “falsification occurred during creation of figure S9C.” The institutions alerted the American Association for the Advancement of Science of the misconduct late last year and requested the paper’s retraction, according to Meagan Phelan, a spokesperson for AAAS, which publishes STM.

Could a national database of scientific misconduct rulings stop repeat offenders?

*Mark Barnes (courtesy of Ropes and Gray LLC)*

In an editorial published today in Science, Michael Lauer and Mark Barnes call for greater transparency in investigations of scientific misconduct with an aim toward making sure prospective academic employers know of applicants’ past misdeeds. As we’ve reported, in the absence of transparency around findings of misconduct, some universities have discovered too late they hired someone who has turned out to be a serial offender.

Lauer, who served as Deputy Director for Extramural Research at the National Institutes of Health from 2015-2025, and Barnes, a partner at Ropes and Gray LLC in Boston who has served as acting research integrity officer at several U.S. institutions, propose a tracking system similar to the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB). That database logs adverse actions and malpractice payments as a way to inform decisions about individual physicians by hospitals. As Lauer and Barnes note, federal law “requires a hospital to query the NPDB whenever it is considering a new applicant for medical privileges, as well as to conduct repeat queries every 2 years to make sure information on staff is up to date.” We asked Barnes to elaborate on the ideas presented in the op-ed. (He notes he is speaking only for himself here.)

Retraction Watch: You write in your op-ed universities may avoid sharing personal information — presumably including results of misconduct investigations — for fear of legal claims of defamation or violations of privacy. Are those fears valid?

Publisher changes citation, registration policies following Retraction Watch investigation

*Wolters Kluwer global headquarters in the Netherlands*

The Dutch publisher Wolters Kluwer has scrapped some of its citation and study-registration requirements at a top-ranked surgery journal founded by the U.K. plastic surgeon Riaz Agha, Retraction Watch has learned.

The move follows our investigation last month that found mandatory citation of reporting guidelines developed by Agha and published in the International Journal of Surgery (IJS) had inflated the impact factor of the open-access title, making it more attractive to authors and readers.

A blanket requirement to register all human studies before manuscript submission, contrary to recommendations from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, appeared to serve another of Agha’s business interests: a paid research registry he founded in 2015.

Judge tosses lawsuit over controversial Paxil ‘Study 329’

A judge has dismissed a legal challenge aimed at forcing Elsevier to retract a long-criticized study that concluded the antidepressant Paxil was safe and effective for teens.

The 2001 paper, published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACAP), has faced scrutiny for more than 20 years by critics who say the study has led to unwarranted and potentially harmful prescribing of the drug to youth. As we reported last October, the journal placed an expression of concern on the paper shortly after a lawsuit was filed by attorney George W. Murgatroyd III against the journal’s owner, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), and Elsevier, which publishes the title.

In his complaint, filed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, Murgatroyd claimed the journal is violating the D.C. Consumer Protection Procedures Act (CPPA) by continuing to “publish, distribute, and sell a fraudulent scientific article that contains material facts” that mislead the public and endanger adolescent mental health and safety. AACAP and Elsevier are profiting from the article by charging readers to buy access to the paper, according to the complaint.

Biology journal ghosts researcher after holding paper hostage

In a story readers might find familiar, a researcher was asked to pay when he demanded a journal retract an article he had never seen but supposedly wrote — and the journal ghosted him when he refused.

In February, Evgenios Agathokleous, an environmental resources researcher at Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology in China, asked Prime Scholars’ European Journal of Experimental Biology to retract a 2023 article that listed him as the sole author. In his email to the journal, he said he had never seen the paper and asked the journal to remove it and publish a formal retraction notice.

Two days later, a Prime Scholars representative named Nina responded, telling Agathokleous “your article has already been successfully published in our journal in accordance with the company’s publication norms and policies.” Nina then asked Agathokleous to pay 519 euros, the equivalent of roughly $600, which they said “covers the costs associated with publication handling, indexing preparation, and database maintenance.”

Publisher to retract entire conference proceedings, ban editor who wrote most of them

*EPJ Web of Conferences* will retract the entire volume of conference proceedings for ICEMR 2025.

On Monday, we published a story about a physicist in India who had three papers on superheavy elements retracted after others in his field began flagging his work. Hours later, a publisher decided to retract an entire volume of conference proceedings after one of the critics pointed out the researcher, H.C. Manjunatha, was responsible for the majority of its contents.

Manjunatha is listed as coordinator of the International Conference on Emerging Frontiers in Material Science and Radiation Physics, which took place in December. Manjunatha was one of four editors for the conference’s proceedings published in EPJ Web of Conferences on March 18. Of the 55 articles in the volume, Manjunatha is an author on 32.

David Boilley, a physicist at the University of Caen Normandy and researcher at GANIL, emailed EDP Sciences, which publishes EPJ Web of Conferences, on March 22 noting Manjunatha’s position as editor and the large number of papers he authored in the volume. Boilley, whom we interviewed for our story, mentioned the forthcoming article to the journal and also included a copy of his recent preprint calling out Manjunatha’s papers.

Technology journal pulls papers for unauthorized author changes, fictitious emails

An Elsevier energy-technology journal has retracted six papers from 2022 whose authors changed without editorial approval during revision of the manuscripts.

The authors also provided fictitious email addresses during the submission process, but changed them after the papers were accepted, according to retraction notices in the February issue of Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments.

While the issues don’t necessarily indicate foul play, authorship changes and the use of non-institutional email addresses can be signs of paper-mill involvement. In 2021, we reported on a website in Iran that listed “articles ready for acceptance,” including one to appear in Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments. The year after our story, the journal pulled the paper, whose author list had also changed at the revision stage.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: