WSJ article: 19 journals closing due to fraud

[Ancient Fellow]

Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., which Tuesday will announce that it is closing 19 journals, some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud.

In the past two years, Wiley has retracted more than 11,300 papers that appeared compromised, according to a spokesperson, and closed four journals. It isn't alone: At least two other publishers have retracted hundreds of suspect papers each...

https://www.wsj.com/science/academic-studies-research-paper-mills-journals-publishing-f5a3d4bc

[Hibush]

Hindawi was in the business, inter alia, of providing an outlet for all the Middle Eastern and South Asian scholars who were required to publish a lot of peer-reveiewed papers without having the resources do the research that usually goes into a peer reveiewed research paper.

That part of the business was pretty evident to me in that some of the journals are in my scholarly discipline. Was Wiley unaware of that when they bought Hindawi a couple years ago, and only discovered the rot getting complaints about fraudulent articles? Or were they aware and decided to catch-and-kill this company that was bringing disrepute to their industry?

I'm glad that publishers have gotten more serious about cleaning up the dregs in larger numbers. The WSJ article makes it sound only like the very dregs, completely made up or copied articles. They are not catching the papers with fudged figures, elided data that don't support the conclusion, or conclusions tht are not supported by the data.