The new tactic employed by science pirates: Bribery of scientific journal editors

A recent publication in the esteemed Science unveiled a new tactic employed by science pirates: the bribery of editors with sums surpassing $20,000 to expedite the publication o articles.

"...along with screenshots showing transfers of up to $20,000 or more. In several cases, the recipient’s name could be made out through sloppy blurring, as could the titles of two papers. More than 50 journal editors had already signed on, he wrote..." 

The article published in Science also highlights a pre-existing "vulnerability" – the fraudulent exploitation of special issues in scientific journals to incorporate low-quality articles. This issue, I recall, had previously been reported in Nature https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2021/11/nature-scammers-impersonate-guest.html

It is undeniable that within the scientific community, no one can plead ignorance regarding the clear and ultimate solution to this issue. This solution entails, as a primary step, the separation of journals from the review process, followed by the subsequent elimination of all scientific journals. This very scenario has already been acknowledged as inevitable by the influential Elsevier. https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-first-15-bricks-in-scientific.html

Before embarking on these endeavors, the scientific community must undertake a pivotal shift—an overdue course of action, underscored by the esteemed researcher Vladen Koltun. This shift entails moving away from the current norm of excessively prioritizing the quantity of publications and the prestige of the journals they occupy. https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2021/11/evaluating-researchers-in-fast-and.html

This involves redirecting our recognition towards super-scientists who transcend the mere accumulation of thousands of articles. The notion that these super-scientists can achieve publication rates 2000%, 3000%, or even 4000% higher than the average is rightly criticized as naive. https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2021/03/how-many-papers-can-superscientist.html

Highlighting concerns about ethical standards in scientific research, a director of Clarivate Analytics explicitly stated that publishing 2 or 3 articles per week is indicative of poor scientific ethics https://pachecotorgal.com/2022/11/20/unethical-authorship-or-genius-like-capabilities-due-to-eugenic-selection/

In conclusion, the Science that this vulnerable world needs is certainly not that which simply translates into a (harmful) deluge of absolutely irrelevant publications (which very few read and which no one takes the time to cite) but rather that Science which causes an impact and which (positively) transform people’s lives. Fortunately, however, we now know what is the most efficient way to finance this type of Science. https://19-pacheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-economist-world-ahead-2024what-is.html