Summarised by Centrist
The closure of several scientific journals at New Jersey publisher Wiley is the result of a growing wave of fraud in the scientific research publication industry.
The retractions and lost revenue due to the growing scandal is a major blow to the multi-billion dollar business of academic publishing.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting the 217-year-old publisher, this month, announced that – following retractions of 11,300 papers – at least 19 of its journals will close.
For Wiley, which publishes more than 2,000 journals, the problem came to light two years ago, shortly after it paid nearly $300m USD for Hindawi, a company founded in Egypt in 1997.
In 2022, a little more than a year after the purchase, scientists online noticed peculiarities in dozens of studies from journals in the Hindawi family of about 250 publications.
Journalist Nidhi Subbaraman reports: “This large-scale fraud… threatens the legitimacy of the nearly [$30b USD] academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole.”
The website Retraction Watch and independent researchers have tracked a range of paper mills responsible for the epidemic of fake research reports and found them in multiple countries including Russia, Iran, Latvia, China and India.
