European Science Editing 46: e53890, doi: 10.3897/ese.2020.e53890

Abuse of peer review process by sham authors

Senthil Kumar^‡, Shahryar Sorooshian^§

‡ Faculty of Industrial Management, University Malaysia Pahang, Pahang, Malaysia§ School of Business Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

Corresponding author: Shahryar Sorooshian ( sorooshian@gmail.com )

Academic editor: Ksenija Bazdaric

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Citation: Kumar S, Sorooshian S (2020) Abuse of peer review process by sham authors. European Science Editing 46: e53890. https://doi.org/10.3897/ese.2020.e53890

Abstract

This is a short letter on how the peer review process of many journals is being abused by some sham authors. While it would be difficult for the journals to identify and eliminate manuscripts that are not submitted with a sincere intention to publish, the universities and learning institutions should develop code of ethics to prevent their staff from abusing the journal review process. Imposing submission fee would also act as a deterrent against unscrupulous submissions.

Keywords

Publication, peer review, ethics, authors