Imposters hijack journal’s peer review process to publish substandard papers
Jamie Durrani
Jamie Durrani
Quote:Once the themed issue was commissioned, the scammers were invited to handle papers and assign referees for them. This enabled them to accept 19 papers that would otherwise have been rejected by the journal for failing to meet its scope and standards for publication.
‘At the beginning it was very quiet, and then we saw a lot of accepted papers popping up. And when we tried immediately to look at quality of these papers, it turned out it was bad,’ says Pinna. ‘At the same time we got contact from the research integrity group from Springer, telling us that there is a problem with this special issue because of suspicious activity and suspicious emails from used referees and so on. So then we started to investigate.’
However, when the journal’s editorial team began investigating the scam, it found that the fake email accounts had expired. ‘There was no way we could even try to contact them back via these domain names – they don’t exist anymore,’ says Pinna. The journal says that it has put in place new measures to avoid falling victim to such scams in future, and hopes that sharing its experience may help other publishers to spot similar attacks.
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
- Bertrand Russell