washingtonpost.com (August 18th 2015)
Peer review is supposed to be the pride of the rigorous academic publishing process.
But increasingly journals are finding out that those supposedly
authoritative checks are being rigged.
In the latest episode of the fake
peer review phenomenon, one of the world’s largest academic publishers,
Springer, has retracted 64 articles
from 10 of its journals after discovering that their reviews were
linked to fake e-mail addresses. The announcement comes nine months
after 43 studies were retracted by BioMed Central (one of Springer’s
imprints) for the same reason.
Retraction Watch co-founder Ivan Oransky ... said he didn’t know of any instances of retractions for faked peer reviews before 2012.
In a report for the journal Nature
last fall, Oransky and his colleagues told the story of a ...
researcher who wrote peer reviews for 28 of his own papers.
Investigations ... have also uncovered a number of services selling
names and contact information for made-up experts guaranteed to give an
expedited, positive review.
In a statement
on its Web site in February, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)
detailed these agencies’ “systematic, inappropriate attempts” to
manipulate the process. COPE’s chair Ginny Barbour wrote in December, “The
uncovering of companies systematically manipulating publications, by
the use of fake reviewers and more, offers an alarming glimpse into what
can happen if reward systems are implemented with no thought or
oversight.”
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See also: wanttoknow.info:
Note: The editor of a top medical journal recently suggested that half all of scientific literature may simply be untrue. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about corruption in science.
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