For several months now, we’ve been reporting on variations on a theme: Authors submitting fake email addresses for potential peer reviewers, to ensure positive reviews. In August, for example, we broke the story of a Hyung-In Moon, who has now retracted 24 papers published by Informa because he managed to do his own peer review.
Now, Retraction Watch has learned that the Elsevier Editorial System
(EES) was hacked sometime last month, leading to faked peer reviews and
retractions — although the submitting authors don’t seem to have been at
fault. As of now, eleven papers by authors in China, India, Iran, and
Turkey have been retracted from three journals.
Here’s one of two identical notices that have just run in Optics & Laser Technology, for two unconnected papers: >>>
