Recently, an American scientist Sam Payne, before publishing in the journal BioSystems, received a review of his own article published three years earlier, but now its authors were five employees of Sechenov University. This is how the world scientific community learnt about the Russian company “International Publisher” (hereinafter – “MI”), which produces fake scientific articles and places them for money in major foreign journals (this story was described in detail in Nature and “Kholod”). This “exchange” for the sale of publications is based in the very centre of business Moscow and openly invites those wishing to buy co-authorship in articles that are 100% guaranteed to be published in journals from the major scientific publication databases Web of Science and Scopus.
The publication “race” began in Russia in 2012 after Putin’s May decrees, which demanded a significant increase in the share of Russian publications in the world’s scientific journals. After that, scientists’ income and university budgets began to depend on the number of publications indexed in international databases. This gave rise to a spate of plagiarised publications and other violations of scientific ethics. At first, Russian scientists translated their own previously published articles from Russian into English and published them in international journals. But rather quickly some of them realised that it was possible to translate not only their own but also other people’s texts into English and publish them for money under their own name in publications that lack scientific peer review. Experts call such publications “predatory journals”. And soon the matter took an industrial turn: intermediaries appeared for centralised selection and sale of authorship of scientific articles, among which the leader became immediately noticeable – the same “MI”, offering scientists “turnkey” publications: not cheap, but with a guarantee. Commercial offers, which they call “offers” in foreign parlance, began to appear on the site in 2016.
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Starting in the same 2016, the Council on the Ethics of Scientific Publications, which was then headed by Anna Kuleshova, spoke publicly about the problems associated with unscrupulous intermediaries, actively mentioning MI as a negative example as well. In one of the informal conversations, a request was made not to mention this or other similar structures as unscrupulous intermediaries, because they were “actively implementing the May decrees of the President”, i.e. increasing the number of articles by Russian authors by all possible means, while the same Council on the Ethics of Scientific Publications was reducing this number (thanks to the mechanism of article retraction introduced in 2017). There have been hints that references in the context of bad faith harm the reputation of these intermediaries, which could become the basis for lawsuits. That is, it is not the crooks who have built a successful business on profanation and discrediting science that should answer in court for their actions, but those who dare to criticise them! There were, by the way, and appeals to law enforcement agencies about the actions of “MI”, but the answer was that no violations of Russian law were found: in fact, after all, the proposed service has been provided, what do you not like?
In 2019, The Insider did not spare 32 thousand 200 rubles for the “control purchase” of the article, as a result of which the publication’s correspondent overnight became a real scientist, co-author of an article indexed in Scopus. But neither the publication of The Insider, nor other outraged statements of scientists and even the leadership of the Russian Academy of Sciences had any effect on the work of the “exchange”.
The Dissernetcommunity , which has been investigating incorrect publications by Russian authors since 2016 , took over MI in 2021. According to the algorithm developed by Anna Abalkina , several hundred publications made by “MI” offers were identified. Based on the results of this work, a joint report was supposed to be made with the Commission of the Russian Academy of Sciences on counteraction to falsification of scientific research. Dissnet was preparing to create a big noise in the press and hoped that it would finally lead to the closure of the “exchange”. The announcement of the upcoming results was published in the newspaper “Troitsky Variant – Science” on 22 February 2022. Two days later, the invasion of Ukraine began. The Commission’s activities were suspended, and instead of the report, a small article was published in “Troitsky Variant” describing the methodology of work and the main results. But even this article seems to have been little noticed: the process of the collapse of Russian science reached new heights with the mass emigration of scientists, the severing of ties with foreign colleagues, and repressions against scientists. The world humanitarian catastrophe has completely overshadowed the scientific catastrophe.
The Dissernet article mentioned above contains, among other things, statistics of publications purchased from MI by university. The largest number of authors who paid for the publication of their name under someone else’s text turned out to be at the very Sechenov University, five employees of which were caught while reviewing an article in the journal BioSystems. Of the five people, three (Associate Professors Savelyeva and Degtyarevskaya, as well as Professor Babaskin) have been listed on the Dissertnet website since 2021, each as co-authors of two publications purchased from MI. As we can see, the information made public by Dissernet did not prevent these “scientists” not only from continuing to teach students, but also from purchasing new articles on the “exchange”. Apparently, payments to the crooks are successfully recouped by grants from the university, which, in turn, receives a budget increase from officials who report on their success in the field of publishing to their superiors.
So when MI writes on its website, “We are known by sight in many universities,” it seems to be true. There is no doubt that the 800 authors of purchased publications found by the Dissertation (600 of them Russian scientists and about 200 foreign ones) are only the tip of the iceberg. And it is striking that among the 600 Russian authors most of them (more than 50%) are associate professors or professors. This is not surprising, as publication costs money, which will not be recouped immediately; non-degree employees usually participate in such publications as fifth or sixth co-authors (the further from the beginning of the list the co-author’s name is, the lower the cost of publication for him/her).
In 2022, MI, in order to “blur” information about real articles for sale and lead investigators down the wrong path, posted on its website about 100,000 real publications by real scientists, mimicring them as their offers by simply copying the abstracts of published articles with Russian authors. They proudly posted the archive with a mixture of real and fake-offers on the Internet. Now they have even more reason to write: “We set ambitious goals and achieve them”.
What can counteract the activities of fraudsters today? The law enforcement agencies are not up to it (and lawmakers should rather work here, but they certainly can’t be counted on today). The scientific community has also withdrawn itself, as we can see from the reaction to all sorts of investigations: “scientists” who have been caught publishing other people’s texts continue to work at their jobs as if nothing had happened, receiving rewards from the university for “good work”, because the university’s rating is proportional to the number of publications. After the recent international scandal, Academician A.R. Khokhlov suggested that the Academy of Sciences, which has considerable influence, should seriously address the problem – but will it want to? Perhaps it depends on how high up the corruption chains stretch.
In the context of globalisation, this situation is spreading around the world with great speed: along with co-authors from China, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, etc., there are already Russians with affiliations in European universities. Perhaps we are standing on the threshold of a new situation, when with a powerful flow of re-locants to Europe there are also “scientists” who drag with them working methods from their previous life in the post-Soviet space.
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Text: Larisa Melikhova, Andrey Rostovtsev, Anna Kuleshova
Andrey Rostovtsev, Anna Kuleshova, Лариса Мелихова 29.10.2024