Ewen Callaway | November 3, 2016 | Nature
A tranche of 58 articles authored by 282 Iran-based researchers were retracted today by a leading scientific publisher, which said it had found signs that the peer review and publication processes had been compromised.
BioMed Central (BMC) will retract 28 articles and investigate another 40, whereas Springer will pull 30 papers and investigate another 9. Both organizations are run by Nature‘s publisher, Springer Nature. (Nature’s news and comment team is editorially independent of the publisher).
The actions follow an investigation, prompted by a whistleblower, that found “evidence of plagiarism, peer review and authorship manipulation, suggestive of attempts to subvert the peer review and publication system to inappropriately obtain or allocate authorship,” according to a press release.
For more see: http://www.nature.com/news/publisher-pulls-58-articles-by-iranian-scientists-over-authorship-manipulation-1.20916
