Academic misconduct, fake authorship letters, cyber fraud: Evidence from the International Political Science Review

This article highlights two types of publishing fraud: fake acceptance letter and financial fraud. Prepared by a third party, fake acceptance letters affirm that a paper, which we had never received before, has been accepted by IPSR. In the financial fraud case, a third party pretends to be an editor of IPSR, sends out authentic looking fake acceptance letters and then solicits authors to pay an article processing fee (APC).


INTRODUCTION
. Other journals, including the International Political Science Review (IPSR) have adopted a hybrid model (with both subscription-based and open access publication possible).Many of these hybrid journals see an ever-increasing number of open access publications (i.e., in IPSR, the number of open access articles increased from less than 5% in 2018 to around 50% in 2022).The second development is the advent of AI and its potential to transform the conduct of research (i.e., ChatGPT and other software have the potential to prepare essays and other types of scholarly manuscripts automatically) (Lund et al., 2023).
Against the backdrop of these new developments, the publishing industry is confronted with problems from data and results falsification, to plagiarism and authorship manipulation.There is a burgeoning literature concerned with documenting these problems and providing detection strategies and plans to future-proof the industry.To this list of problems, we add 'old fashioned' fake authorship letters and financial fraud, both of which the IPSR has recently encountered.This case study article first documents how authors either willingly or unwittingly use fake authorship documents for promotion in the discipline.Second, we document how the advent of open access publications and greater use of article processing charges (APCs) has created an opportunity for cyber criminals to defraud unwitting scholars and dupe them into paying fees for publications by creating fake intermediary images of websites that look like real journal submission webpages.The core objective of this article is to raise awareness of this new pernicious problem for colleagues and to begin a conversation about devising strategies to combat these types of academic fraud in an ever more challenging publishing environment.
We proceed as follows.In the next section, we highlight some of the key debates and important recent developments in the landscape of publication fraud and note that financial fraud (specifically cyber-crime) is not much discussed.Section 3 provides a short overview of IPSR for context.Section 4 provides a brief overview of the typical authorship, publication and reviewer frauds that IPSR regularly encounters and presents the new APC fraud case.In the discussion, we tease out some of the important implications for the publishing industry, librarians and scholars and we discuss the urgent need for much wider information flows to all scholars and especially early career researchers on how the global journal publishing industry works.

DUPLICITOUS BEHAVIOUR, FALSIFICATION AND OUTRIGHT FRAUD
Research fraud is 'fabrication, falsification or deception in performing or reporting research results' (Harvey, 2020) The number of article retractions is growing but as Steen et al. (2016) have argued 'it is not clear whether the increase in retractions is a result of an increase in the rate of publication of flawed articles or an increase in the rate at which flawed articles are recognised and withdrawn'.Cases such as Mart Bax and Donald Green involving data fabrication and article retractions remain the exception rather than the rule.In a meta-analysis of studies on research misconduct, Fanelli (2009) reported that close to 2% of scientists admitted having 'fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once'.
Another serious form of publishing fraud is so-called ghost writing (see Dadkhah, 2015) where articles are written and sold to unscrupulous authors for subsequent publication.In the medical field, there is also a practice of ghost writing by writers from medical companies, who have a stake in the content of the article (Langdon-Neuner, 2008).The increased sophistication of AI is likely to increase this challenge.
Aside from these obvious cases, the day-to-day practice of academic fraud consists of many more subtle forms of cheating (see Reisig et al., 2020).These include adding scholars to the list of authors on an article, even when they have had little to do with the research and writing process (Rivera, 2018).Another form of misconduct entails listing articles on CVs (résumés) that have not actually been published.For example, Nosnik et al. (2010) report that 9% of applicants to a Urology residency programme had unverifiable publications listed on their applications.
Predatory journals that often bypass normal peer review processes further undermine professional standards.There has been a proliferation of commercial journals that publish scholarly work for an article-processing fee.Defining which journals are 'predatory' is a complex process that is contested, often by those journals labelled 'predatory'.Beall ( 2017) has been at the forefront of highlighting features of predatory journals such the absence of an impact factor, errors in the manuscripts and false claims of lineage by the journals.Predatory publishing is not purely a supply side problem.Mills and Inouye (2021) provide an insightful exploration of the 'pressures and incentives' that are at play when an author decides to publish with one of these journals.Some authors have labelled publishing in predatory journals as cyber-crime (Umlauf & Mochizuki, 2018) arguing that these journals undermine the credibility of science and pose a pernicious problem but publishing in a predatory journal is not a criminal act, either on the part of the author or on the part of the publisher.
The peer review process is also not immune to academic misconduct.'Reviewer circles' and 'fake peer review' are a pernicious problem (for a wider discussion, see Bell et al., 2024;also da Silva, 2017).The circles can work in a variety of ways.Authors can recommend 'potential reviewers' during the submission process and alert these colleagues in advance so that they collude and provide very positive evaluations while hiding their conflicts of interest (Littman, 2021).Editors have also been identified as perpetrators, especially in the creation of fake peer reviews.In these cases, editors invite non-existent academics to review manuscripts through a web of fake email addresses (Oransky, 2015).
Fake reviews or review rigging have led to paper retractions.In an opinion piece Kulkani (2016, p.1) described the practice as 'rampant' and raised concerns about its potential long-term impact on the credibility of science.
All of these practices are receiving more attention across the publishing world.The discussions cross disciplines but there is an important concentration of work in science, technology, engineering and medicine (STEM) journals.Data fabrication and manipulation, and predatory publishing, are forms of academic misconduct that are reasonably well documented.The use and circulation of fake acceptance letters is a form of academic misconduct that is not documented as widely and we take up this aspect in this article.And we add an additional category of publishing fraud, which is effectively cyber-crime; the deliberate defrauding of authors through deceptively taking APCs for publication in non-existent journals.This latter practice is one that scholars are increasingly vulnerable to as open access charges have become increasingly common and cyber-crime a global scourge.

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW
To illustrate the two forms of academic misconduct, we present a case study of IPSR, the flagship journal of the International Political Science Association.The journal was established in 1980 and published its 44th volume in 2023.It is a generalist journal that publishes research from all sub-disciplines of political science and from all regions of the world.Furthermore, it is pluralist in its approach to methodology and has especially prioritized gender balance since its foundation.The journal also has a global reach.
In 2022, the journal received submissions from authors in 59 countries and although acceptances come from a narrower range of countries, authors from the Global South are included in higher numbers than in other generalist political science journals.
On average the journal has about 300,000 article downloads per year.This background is important to highlight the global mandate and impact of the publication.The journal is indexed in the Social Science Citation Index, Web of Science, Scopus and Google.In 2022, the acceptance rate was just 9%.
IPSR is a highly competitive and desirable place to publish political science research.It is highly visible in the discipline because of its global focus, strong ranking position but also because of its age.The journal has entered its fifth decade in operation.These factors may have caused the journal to become more of a target for academic malpractice scams.It is likely better known than some more highly ranked publications that publish in specific subfields of the discipline.But this is somewhat informed speculation on our part; data on research fraud is incomplete, and political science journals engage infrequently with these topics on their pages.We document two forms of fraud here and hope that this may lead to wider awareness of academic fraud but also that it might ignite wider sharing of experiences and data by journal editors.

RESEARCH FRAUD AT IPSR
The first problem we have encountered is the use of fake acceptance letters (see Appendices 1 and 2) of papers that have not been submitted to IPSR.These letters affirm that the authors' paper has been accepted in IPSR after peer review.The letters usually include a forged signature of the editorial assistant or one of the editors and a screenshot of the IPSR journal logo from the website combined with a short text confirming acceptance of the paper.We have a suspicion that a third party, who has falsely identified themselves as an editor of IPSR, and who has most likely solicited the submission of research papers to a fake IPSR account, has prepared these fraudulent communications.The fact that, so far, we have only received two templates of these letters from scholars from different parts of the world increases our suspicion that an organized cheating scheme is at play.However, we do not know if authors paid anything in return for receiving a fake acceptance letter, or if the reception of the fake acceptance letter was accompanied by any request for paying an APC to the fake editors.Some authors, who received these fake acceptance letters, had some doubts about their authenticity and requested email confirmation that their paper had really been accepted.However, in most cases, they have not written to us personally, but rather asked a third person to send the email (see Appendix 3).In other instances, we have received emails from PhD supervisors asking us, if the paper in question has really been accepted by IPSR (see Appendix 4).This implies that PhD students have apparently used these letters as proof of publication to be admitted for their PhD defence.However, from the information we have, we cannot judge if the PhD students had willingly used these fake acceptances as proof of publication to advance to the PhD defence, or whether they believed that these fake acceptance letters were real.We can only speculate about these points, because we do not know for sure how recipients received these letters and if any financial transaction was involved.However, what we do know is that two versions of the template exist that have been used by a wider group.We have highlighted the two samples of these letters here and the practice dates at least to 2016 when we first encountered it.Over the past years, we have received between three and five of these letters each year.
The 'good' thing with the fake acceptance letters is that they use a relatively poor reproduction of the IPSR logo and letterhead template and they often contain English language mistakes.These letters also do not include a manuscript number.Hence, this type of fraud is relatively easy to detect.
IPSR has also received email requests to verify reviewing activities by colleagues that have not completed the numbers of reviews they were claiming.These requests are quite rare but they continued, even since IPSR started to publish a thank you note to all reviewers, in the year after they completed their review.
Recently IPSR encountered a new fraud scheme, which was more sophisticated and directly involved financial loss to the author.The fraud scheme is a form of cyber-crime and presented as follows.A third party with an email address that resembled the main IPSR email, contacted authors asking them to submit a paper to IPSR.In the email, they pretended to be a representative of IPSR.Afterwards, the author made a submission by email and received a confirmation email from the editorial manager that mimicked our acknowledgement of submission email (see Appendix 5).The email stated that the journal had received the submission and also included a manuscript number.Attached to the email was a screenshot (see Appendix 6), which exactly imitated our author page and the screenshot confirmed that the manuscript had been submitted.Two weeks later, the author received another email reporting that the paper was accepted by IPSR (see Appendix 7).This email was accompanied by a screenshot from the Scholar One system we use indicating that the paper was accepted (see Appendix 8).The first part of the email again mimicked our acceptance letters very closely.However, the second part of the email asked the author to pay an APC, as a prerequisite for publication; something that none of our emails would do.In this case, the author paid an APC of 802 USD and only got suspicious when asked to pay an additional 700 USD (see Appendix 9).He contacted the journal then, using the correct email addresses that are available on the IPSR journal webpage.
The author sent all the correspondence he had received directly to us.Initially, given the similarity and quality of the emails and the screenshots, and the fact that the author had an IPSR-type manuscript number, we had concerns that our system had potentially been hacked.Nevertheless, with the assistance of our publisher, SAGE, we were able to reconstruct what had occurred and determine that the manuscript had never been submitted to IPSR, and the screenshots were fraudulent imitations of the IPSR system.Furthermore, SAGE was able to determine that the fake IPSR email address operated from Kazakhstan.

CONCLUSION
Academic fraud, its causes and consequences, have generated an extensive literature, which is, of course connected to the pressure to publish (McNaught, 2015).Arguments for greater transparency in who publishes journals and greater awareness among academics of the pitfalls and perils in the publication system have grown in number (Downes, 2020) but academic fraud is still widespread.In this article, we have presented a recurrent phenomenon that our journal regularly encounters, the circulation and use of fake acceptance letters.We have also highlighted reviewer record problems.More recently, we have also come across a highly sophisticated financial fraud scheme, which, in our case, has robbed a scholar of 800 USD.This IPSR case study potentially highlights a larger problem.While publication charges have been a feature of journal publishing in some disciplines for many decades, the global spread of open access agreements has made APCs a much more typical feature of the publication process.A great many authors, or universities on their behalf, are involved in making direct payments to publishers usually, and occasionally to journals.We argue that fraudsters might take advantage of these new developments trying to extract payments from authors for 'so-called' acceptances in major journals.While these acceptances are fake, they are more and more difficult to detect, especially for someone relatively inexperienced in the publication process.To a small extent non-Anglophone scholars are at more risk, as they are less likely to spot the grammar infelicities that are more obvious to native speakers.AI may also exacerbate this problem, lowering the cost of creating these elaborate fakes and making it easier to target much wider groups of scholars.Therefore, it is even more important that prospective authors of IPSR, and any other journal for that matter, follow the subsequent guidelines: 1. Journals like IPSR use online submission portals (e.g., Scholar One or Manuscript Central).Authors should only submit their articles using these submission portals.These portals are prominently displayed on the webpages of each journal and should only be accessed in this way.2. Authors should beware acceptance letters in PDF format.
These are highly likely to be 'fake'.Most journals send out their acceptance and rejection letters using the aforementioned platforms.If authors receive a letter in PDF format, they should engage with the journal editors about the letters as soon as they receive them.
3. If authors receive an unsolicited email from a journal, they should check the journal's email address against the official information on the website of the journal.Oftentimes, fraudsters use email addresses that resemble that of the journal, but are different in one or two letters.

If authors have any doubt about the authenticity of an email
or solicitation, they should always contact the editors of the journal or the publishing house before responding.
Finally, we also argue that there is an important onus on publishers, scholarly associations and experienced researchers to share practical publishing advice.Predation and fraud in publishing are on the rise, and awareness is one of the most important tools to counter this.We urge journal editors to organize and participate in roundtables on publishing practices at conferences and workshops, and to share these important messages.Direct invitations to submit a paper to a highly ranked journal for a special collection are an affirming career experience.However, they are very rare.Invitations to submit to predatory journals are a daily occurrence and potentially pernicious for a scholar's finances and career.We must do more to highlight this.
At a global level, the publishing industry has been in constant flux over the past decade.Two developments are especially noteworthy: open access and artificial intelligence (AI).Most importantly, the industry has moved toward open access publishing with new open access journals emerging and established journals such as the Canadian Journal of Political Science or the European Political Science Review changing their modus operandi from a subscription-based model to a complete open access model