Scammers impersonate guest editors to get sham papers publishedhttps://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03035-yHundreds of articles published in peer-reviewed journals are being retracted after scammers exploited the processes for publishing special issues to get poor-quality papers — sometimes consisting of complete gibberish — into established journals. In some cases, fraudsters posed as scientists and offered to guest-edit issues that they then filled with sham papers.
Elsevier is withdrawing 165 articles currently in press and plans to retract 300 more that have been published as part of 6 special issues in one of its journals, and Springer Nature is retracting 62 articles published in a special issue of one journal. The retractions come after the publishers each issued expressions of concern earlier this year, covering hundreds of articles.
Science-integrity experts expect that more investigations will come in the months ahead as other titles realize that they have been duped.
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Many journals publish special issues — collections of articles that focus on a particular topic of relevance to their readers. These issues are often overseen by guest editors who are experts in the research topic, but are not usually involved in the day-to-day editorial work of the journal.
Fraudsters have been caught several times in recent years while trying to use special issues as a way to get low-quality papers published in legitimate journals — but the number of affected papers seems to be increasing.
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“All of the evidence points to an organized network that tries — in this case successfully — to infiltrate scientific journals with the objective of easily publishing manuscripts from pseudo-scientists or less-productive researchers who want to appear in respectable journals,” wrote three members of the journal’s editorial board in the December article.
Unclear motivations
It is not yet clear why scammers are manipulating the system to publish sham articles. Cabanac suggests that it might be due to the pressure on researchers to publish papers to continue their careers. The ability to publish in specific journals — even if the papers are clearly nonsense — could allow some researchers to “get publications for their CV and a green card to stay in academia”, he says.
"The Science" needs to clean up its act before demanding trustful belief from others. Especially, "The Science" needs to recognize that they are being hijacked to support agendas with little or no foundation in fact.
