{"id":1563,"date":"2014-04-04T11:35:12","date_gmt":"2014-04-04T11:35:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.editage.com\/insights\/authorship-for-sale\/"},"modified":"2025-04-04T09:59:06","modified_gmt":"2025-04-04T09:59:06","slug":"authorship-for-sale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.editage.com\/insights\/authorship-for-sale","title":{"rendered":"Authorship for sale?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-size: 14px;\"><span style=\"font-family: verdana,geneva,sans-serif;\">Money is believed to buy everything\u2014including authorship in journals covered by SCI, the <a href=\"http:\/\/science.thomsonreuters.com\/cgi-bin\/jrnlst\/jloptions.cgi?PC=K\">Science Citation Index<\/a>, as revealed in an article [1] in<em> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencemag.org\/\">Science<\/a><\/em>, one of the most prestigious among journals that publish original research. Apparently, authorship can change hands during that brief window between the formal acceptance of a research paper and its publication: in the case reported in<em> Science<\/em>, during that window, \u2018a total of four authors [were] added, and two dropped\u2019.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-size: 14px;\"><span style=\"font-family: verdana,geneva,sans-serif;\">To my mind, this is a travesty of research but yet another instance of the market principle: if demand greatly exceeds supply, then scarcity generates several illegitimate means to meet the demand. Authorship of papers published in the journals covered by the Science Citation Index is that scarce commodity in this context. Authorship in any journal, for that matter, is scarce, and \u2018predatory journals\u2019 can provide that commodity: you write a paper, pay the required page charges, and have your paper published in one of the predatory journals\u2014those journals that are in fact published expressly not so much to advance knowledge as to provide a channel to publish the work of those who pay for the privilege.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-size: 14px;\"><span style=\"font-family: verdana,geneva,sans-serif;\">The article from<em> Science<\/em> deserves wide publicity, and I urge the readers of Editage Insights to read it in full.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-size: 14px;\"><span style=\"font-family: verdana,geneva,sans-serif;\">The pressure to publish takes its toll. Whereas the above incident shows how that pressure can be exploited for making money, another recent news story shows the humorous \u2013 but potentially serious \u2013 side of it:<em> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/\">Nature<\/a><\/em> reports in a recent article [2] that \u2018Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.\u2019 A software package, developed by scientists at MIT, can produce full research papers \u2013 complete with figures and references \u2013 on its own, with practically no human intervention [3]. You can read more about this incident in this insightful article:\u00a0<\/span><\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/www.editage.com\/insights\/is-peer-review-really-effective-the-case-of-120-withdrawn-papers\"><span style=\"font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;\">Is peer review really effective? The case of 120 withdrawn papers<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-size: 14px;\"><span style=\"font-family: verdana,geneva,sans-serif;\">Editage Insights is committed to promoting genuine scholarship, and I urge our readers to avoid undesirable shortcuts to authorship.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-size: 14px;\"><span style=\"font-family: verdana,geneva,sans-serif;\">[1] <em>Science<\/em> <strong>342<\/strong>: 1035\u20131039 [29 November 2013]<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-size: 14px;\"><span style=\"font-family: verdana,geneva,sans-serif;\">DOI:10.1126\/science.342.6162.1035<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-size: 14px;\"><span style=\"font-family: verdana,geneva,sans-serif;\">[2]<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/news\/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763\">www.nature.com\/news\/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1&#8230;<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-size: 14px;\"><span style=\"font-family: verdana,geneva,sans-serif;\">[3] <a href=\"http:\/\/pdos.csail.mit.edu\/scigen\/\">http:\/\/pdos.csail.mit.edu\/scigen\/<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Money is believed to buy everything\u2014including authorship in journals covered by SCI, the Science Citation Index, as revealed in an article [1] in Science, one of the most prestigious among journals that publish original research. Apparently, authorship can change hands during that brief window between the formal acceptance of a research paper and its publication: [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":33313,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2405],"tags":[2640,85],"new_categories":[],"new_tags":[],"series":[],"class_list":["post-1563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-industry-trends","tag-author-guidelines","tag-research-misconduct"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v25.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Authorship for sale? | Editage Insights<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Money is believed to buy everything\u2014including authorship in journals covered by SCI, the Science Citation\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.editage.com\/insights\/authorship-for-sale\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Authorship for sale? 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