I’ve written several posts about predatory journals –  journals that present themselves as academic journals, but which have no meaningful peer review and are published by questionable organizations. These journals exploit authors by charging excessive publication fees, and also give undeserved legitimacy to misleading or deeply flawed research. Now, thanks to the ongoing excellent work of Retraction Watch, I’ve become aware of another academic research scam: authorships for sale.

The opportunity to buy being listed as an author of an academic paper was something that was entirely new to me. Now, after looking into it, I believe it deserves a lot more attention. Like publishing research in predatory journals, selling authorship raises some very serious questions about the integrity of some academic publishers and researchers. And as has been pointed out elsewhere, financial grants intended to support research – especially government-funded grants – should actually be spent on research, not on dubious publishing “opportunities”.

I’m going to explain the basic model of selling authorships, and show some examples that were alarmingly easy to find.

When legitimate academic research is published, the authors of the research paper are assumed to have actually participated in the research that the paper describes. Traditionally, the authors’ names usually appear in a ranked order, with the first name being the author that contributed the most to the research or to writing the paper, the second name being the author that contributed the second most, and so forth. Thus, being “first author” or “lead author” carries more prestige, and sometimes more value in an evaluation, than being a second or third or fourth author.

The companies and individuals that sell authorships work this way. First, the sellers write a research paper  – or get someone else to write it, or get AI to write it. There’s no proof that the research described in the paper was ever actually conducted, or that the research outcomes reported in the paper are accurate. Then the sellers go on social media and advertise that authorships are available. They list the titles of the papers being offered, and might also indicate where the paper is going to be submitted: for example, to a specific type of conference, or to a journal in a specific ranking category. Since most of these sellers offer opportunities to be named first, second, third or fourth author, it’s not unreasonable to suspect that the fee to become a first author is higher than the fee to become an author in a less prestigious slot.

Potential “authors” contact the sellers, pay a fee, and get their names added to the paper –  having had absolutely nothing to do with the research described in the paper, and nothing to do with writing it. Then the paper gets published. Usually, and not surprisingly, it gets published in a predatory journal.

Allegedly, WhatsApp and Instagram are the social media channels where a lot of this selling and buying happens. I don’t use either, so I went on Facebook and ran a search on “authorships available”. Then I went on Google Scholar and searched for article titles that appeared in the “authorships available” ads I found on Facebook.  Here’s just a few examples of what I found.

Facebook post #1 (notice the titles of the papers that I’ve circled)

Here’s a paper with the same title as paper T-5  in Facebook Post #1, showing up in Google Scholar as a journal publication.And here’s a paper with the same title as paper T-9 in Facebook post #1, showing up in Google Scholar as a journal publication.

Facebook Post #2 (notice the title of the paper that I’ve circled)

Here’s a paper with the same title as paper T-8 in Facebook post #2, showing up in Google Scholar as a research publication.

All three of these papers are about very specialized research topics. The chances of these paper titles being advertised and different papers with identical titles being published shortly thereafter are…..extremely small.

One of the advertisers on Facebook included this statement in their post:

Seriously?

I found these three examples in 15 minutes. If evidence of authorships being sold is this simple to find on relatively public online sites, imagine how much selling and buying is happening on other social media channels, or in private conversations, texts, and chats.

[UPDATE: This excellent article by a science journalist in India describes his interactions with a publisher selling opportunities to publish a journal article without peer reviewing, and selling opportunities for authorship. The cost for authorship quoted by the publisher were between RS11,000 and RS16,000 – about $170 and $250 in Canadian dollars. All of their conversation was conducted on WhatsApp.]

In most institutions’ and systems’ codes of research ethics, falsely claiming that you participated in research, or falsely claiming that you participated in writing a journal article, is considered unethical. For example, the Tri-Council Framework on Responsible Conduct For Research, published by Canada’s three federal research funding agencies, states that published research should “includ[e] as authors, with their consent, all those and only those who have made a substantial contribution to, and who accept responsibility for, the contents of the publication or document. The substantial contribution may be conceptual or material.”

If authorships that have been bought are so easy to detect, and if buying authorships is unethical, why are academic researchers doing it? I suspect the reasons are very similar to the reasons that researchers publish in predatory journals, as discussed in this research article I (genuinely) co-authored.

• Researchers might be desperate to fill up their record of publications, if they are applying for tenure, promotion, or some other opportunity in which their publication record will be reviewed and evaluated.
• Post-secondary institutions may be part of systems in which their researchers’ productivity – as measured by the number or type of journal publications – is used to rank institutions. These systems might rank the quality of an institution’s research (such as the Research Excellence Framework in the UK) or assign the institution to rankings within a category (such as the National Institutional Ranking Framework in India). Higher productivity by individual researchers leads to higher overall productivity for the institution, and thus results in higher rankings. Higher rankings may be particularly important for institutions if rewards such as eligibility for research funding are linked to an institution being placed in certain categories, or linked to achieving certain rankings within categories.
• In most post-secondary systems and granting systems, there are few or no penalties for publishing in predatory journals, and few or no substantial punishments for research misconduct. The risk to a researcher of potentially being caught in unethical actions may be outweighed by the potential rewards they can receive from having more journal publications.

The academic world has been reluctant to take meaningful action against predatory publishers, and against researchers that knowingly publish in predatory journals. But buying authorship is potentially much more serious than publishing in predatory journals. A researcher can claim that they didn’t know a particular journal was predatory when they published an article in it. A researcher can’t claim they didn’t know what was happening when an authorship opportunity for an article is posted on social media, and their name then appears as an author on the published article. Maybe this troubling trend will be another reason for institutions and funding agencies to start taking these problems more seriously.