Category: Third party

At the end of July, Muttukrishna Sarvananthan noticed something curious in the publications of Chulani Herath, a senior lecturer at the Open University of Sri Lanka in Nawala.

Herath is listed as a middle author on seven papers about various topics in medicine, including heart disease, stroke, and burnout among general practitioners in China. 

That struck Sarvananthan, an economist in Sri Lanka, as odd. Herath is a psychosocial counselor, not a physician or expert in medicine. “How could she possibly co-author an article in medical sciences?” he wrote in one email to a journal editor, requesting the editor investigate Herath’s paper as a potential product of a paper mill. 

Sarvananthan has written to the editors of the journals that published the following seven papers, requesting they investigate: 

Continue reading In four years, a psychosocial counselor co-authored seven papers on disparate medical topics. How? 

Many readers may have heard whisper of companies that offer a range of writing services — some more ethical than others. Although some companies offer to edit and polish writing, others can write PhD research proposals, masters’ theses, or even a dissertation. In other words, the students engage in so-called “contract cheating” — paying someone else to produce work they pass of as their own. We spoke to Cath Ellis at UNSW Sydney, first author of a recent analysis in the International Journal for Educational Integrity, about the extent of the problem, and what troubles her most about these services.

Retraction Watch: How many sites appear to offer PhD theses, which then might get published? Or any other services that could end up in the published literature (say, by even established researchers)?

Continue reading Psst…Need a PhD thesis? That’ll be $63,000

Some recent communications from companies involved in academic publishing have some journal representatives worried. In one instance, a manuscript editing company offered to pay an editor to help its papers get published in his journal; in another, a research ethics company threatened to investigate all of an author’s papers if he or she didn’t donate thousands to support the company’s efforts. Bottom line: Research authors (and editors) should beware companies offering unethical manuscript editing and other publishing services. Below are examples (which we’ve verified) compiled by Chris Graf, Co-Vice Chair of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and Society Partnership Director at Wiley; Richard Holt, editor-in-chief of Diabetic Medicine and researcher at the University of Southampton; Tamara Welschot, the Director of Research Integrity and Publishing Services at Springer Nature; and Matt Hodgkinson, Head of Research Integrity, Hindawi Limited.

We share for the benefit of researchers (and journal editors and publishers) three new warnings cut from the same cloth as other recent peer review “scams.” These warnings appear to indicate that third parties continue to attempt to inappropriately influence peer review and journal publishing.

Here are the details.

Continue reading Pay to play? Three new ways companies are subverting academic publishing