Is there a need for creators of imaginary authors to face legal consequences?
Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva · Croatian Medical Journal · 2020
Is there a need for creators of imaginary authors to face legal consequences?Academic publishing is increasingly threatened by unscholarly forces, including false and/or predatory entities.One serious false element are individuals that masquerade as fictitious authors by creating fictitious personalities, emails, and affiliations, sometimes misappropriating the entities of real scholars.One objective of fictitious papers is to target "predatory" (ie, illegitimate and unscholarly) as well as legitimate (ie, indexed and metricized) journals or publishers, possibly to expose flawed peer review.Some fictitious papers are retracted, but retractions are insufficient since the real individuals who created fictitious authors and papers suffer no ethical or legal consequences.To exemplify this threat, academics should pay attention to the retraction of the "Bo Liu" et al study in Elsevier's The International Journal of Biochemistry & Cell Biology (IJB&CB).This is not a sting operation or hoax paper (1).It is a case of unprecedented deceit that threatens academic publishing, and is a new form of "predatory publishing" in the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) era because it preys upon the ingenuity of open access and subscription predatory and indexed, peer-reviewed journals (2).Predatory publishing is a waste of resources (3), a destabilizing force that disrupts "the control of scholarly communication by forprofit multi-national corporations" (4), or consumer fraud (5).The latter was substantiated by a high-profile US Federal Trade Commission vs OMICS International case (6,7).Do the actions underlying the "Bo Liu" et al study fall under the False Statements Act? Are legal consequences such as criminal penalties justified in academia, which appears to be increasingly "militarized" (8)?Even though Hickman et al (9) suggested criminal liability for metrics manipulation or for coercive citation tactics by authors or editors, the criminalization of research misconduct faces multiple challenges and limitations (10).LexisNexis, a legal firm in RELX Group, Elsevier's parent organization, appears to have suf-ficient forensic, legal, and financial resources to conduct a more in-depth investigation.