Research-integrity sleuths have uncovered hundreds of online advertisements that offer the chance to buy authorship on research papers to be published in reputable journals.
Vitalij Pecharsky, a materials scientist at Iowa State University in Ames and editor-in-chief of an affected journal, was “really pissed off” when he found out about the adverts. “I know many things are for sale, but authorship? It’s just crazy. This is just totally unacceptable,” he toldMost of the adverts are posted on social-media sites including Facebook and Telegram, as well as the websites of companies that claim to offer academic publishing services.
In May 2022, Springer Nature retracted a paper for the first time over suspicions that some of the authorships were paid-for, after investigating a tip-off from Abalkina. It has since retracted 11 papers in a further 5 journals over similar concerns. More investigations are under way. In these cases, Pecharsky said, new authors were added to the papers after the first round of peer review. He launched an effort to review any papers published in the journal over the past two years that had authorship-change requests after the first round of review. “I just want to make sure that this thing isn’t going to propagate,” he toldWise says that since October, five journals have investigated and retracted a paper each as a result of his sleuthing.
pokrath All person designated as authors must claim authorship, and all who are eligible to participate must be indicated yet money can buy anything