Frontiers, like other for-profit open access publishers, has struggled with a perception it has low editorial standards and weak peer review. But is that true? Brian Owens reports In September 2023 Frontiers—one of the world’s largest open access scientific publishers, with a stable of 230 journals covering just about every field of science—retracted 38 papers.1 All had been linked to the “unethical practice of buying or selling authorship on research papers,” known as “authorship for sale,” in which authors, during the review process, sell coauthorship to people who have not contributed to the research. In response to the scandal the company changed its policy on requests for changes to authorship after a paper has been accepted. The new policy states that requests for changes to the author list will be accepted only “under exceptional circumstances and after in-depth assessment by the Frontiers’ research integrity unit.” Frontiers also said it would maintain a record of all such requests to identify suspicious patterns and trends. And it pledged to monitor websites where authorships are known to be put up for sale for any mention of Frontiers content. Anastasia Long, the company’s public relations manager, says that authorship for sale is an industry-wide problem, potentially affecting more than 10 000 papers. “As with all attempts to systematically breach codes of ethical conduct, publishers must work together to put a stop to this practice,” she tells The BMJ . “This is why we also share details of our investigations and the methods we use to identify authorship-for-sale papers, and ‘paper mill’ papers, with publishing organisations.” Helen Macdonald, The BMJ ’s publication ethics and content integrity editor, says: “When changes in authorship are requested we need to understand what change is being proposed and why. We also need to know that all of the other …

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Frontiers 的期刊出现大规模撤稿——出版商在研究人员心目中的声誉如何？

与其他营利性开放获取出版商一样，Frontiers 一直面临编辑标准低、同行评审薄弱的看法。但这是真的吗？ Brian Owens 报道称，2023 年 9 月，Frontiers（世界上最大的开放获取科学出版商之一，拥有 230 种期刊，涵盖几乎所有科学领域）撤回了 38 篇论文。1 所有这些都与“购买或出售的不道德行为”有关。研究论文的作者权”被称为“出售作者权”，即作者在审查过程中将共同作者权出售给未对研究做出贡献的人。为了应对这一丑闻，该公司改变了在论文被接受后要求更改作者身份的政策。新政策规定，只有“在特殊情况下并经过前沿研究诚信部门的深入评估后”才会接受更改作者名单的请求。 Frontiers 还表示，它将保留所有此类请求的记录，以识别可疑的模式和趋势。它还承诺监控那些因提及 Frontiers 内容而出售作者权的网站。该公司公关经理阿纳斯塔西娅·朗 (Anastasia Long) 表示，出售作者署名是一个全行业的问题，可能会影响超过 10,000 篇论文。 “与所有系统性违反道德行为准则的尝试一样，出版商必须共同努力制止这种做法，”她告诉《英国医学杂志》。 “这就是为什么我们还与出版机构分享我们的调查细节以及我们用来识别作者待售论文和‘造纸厂’论文的方法。” 《英国医学杂志》的出版道德和内容完整性编辑海伦·麦克唐纳 (Helen Macdonald) 表示：“当要求更改作者身份时，我们需要了解所提议的更改内容以及原因。我们还需要知道所有其他......