Posted on social networks, ads have popped up in recent months for a very strange service: for varying amounts, service providers sell to whoever wantsbe cited in the search – obviously without even having taken part in it.
A well-built network
Facebook and Telegram would serve as the main vectors for the dissemination of these offers. They contain the title of the article that will appear (therefore an overview of the subject), the name of the magazine victim of this scam and the prices. It will take anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars for his name to appear in an article on string theory, for example.
Nature magazine quoted the reaction of Vitalij Pecharsky, of Iowa State University, to Ames, and editor of one of the publications involved in this trade. “I know a lot of things are for sale, but research authorship? It’s crazy. It is simply unacceptable, totally unacceptable.»
We owe this discovery toinspectors” responsible for respect for ethics and integrity outgoing documents. Their investigations led not only to revealing this process, but above all its scope.
Back in 2019, economist Anna Abalkina (Free University of Berlin) and Nick Wise (engineer at Cambridge) spotted these online ads. The former tracks those that come from websites based in Russia and Eastern Europe, when his colleague engages in social networks. The latter thus signals Telegram accounts with at least 300 offers of this kind, each.
The magazine template in question
The newspapers, alerted and a little worried by these methods, withdrew the offending articles. But not everyone has the courage to admit that they have served, in spite of themselves, in support of these false articles. Sure, everyone points out the imperative of the integrity and reliability of archives : Readers need publications to be authentic, to trust the results.
However, the principle depends on several flaws in the functioning of the research world. “It is big business run by increasingly sophisticated organizations.warns the Publication Ethics Committee. This non-profit facility monitors all forms of abuse, and the industry is not without it.
READ: Scientific publishing, ‘predators’ usurp identities and earnings
First, researchers must constantly feed their CVs with novelties, otherwise they will sink into oblivion. Secondly, many titles do not seriously check the content of what they broadcast – and are content to collect the required publishing royalties.
The entire economic model of this sector is directly highlighted, right from the presentation a gaping flaw in its modus operandi. Anyone in a hurry to have their name associated with the results, whatever the topic, easily gives in to these sirens…
Photo credits: illustration – fedee P (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)