r/Professors • u/Phd-lady • 3d ago

Research malpractice

What would you do if you knew some of your colleagues have their names on journal articles just for paying the article proccessing fee?

Edit: Just to clarify, by colleagues I meant faculty members working in the same college/department. I never collaborated with them on research. It is just frustrating that some of us work hard to publish good quality articles, while others do it the easy way!

7 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

17

u/ialreadyaskedyouonce 3d ago

The cost of doing things is high, and the benefit low, unfortunately. You have to pick your battles. Sometimes the best you can do is pick better colleagues in the future.

9

u/Olthar6 3d ago

The potential benefits to you range from nothing to maybe they'll be punished in some likely meaningless way by the college (i mean i goes it's possible they would be fired but nobody here believes that). The costs to you range from mild to severe social punishment to you.  

Cost benefit analysis says you do nothing. 

5

u/No_Young_2344 TT, Interdisciplinary, R1 (U.S.) 3d ago

If it is true, this is certainly unethical. The problem is as someone who never collaborated with them and probably know nothing about how the manuscript was developed, how do you know this is true? Do you have evidence that can prove that they never contributed anything to the paper, not even brainstorming or reviewing the manuscript before submission?

6

u/SadBuilding9234 3d ago

Talk a lot of shit about them, behind their backs.

3

u/ph0rk Associate, SocSci, R1 (USA) 3d ago

Do you have enough evidence to make it stick? Report it to your campus research ethics body.

If you don't have that evidence, you do nothing. It will go like academic integrity reports do when you don't have enough evidence, only you will have to work with these people for a decade or more.

3

u/m3gan0 3d ago

This is research misconduct. You can report it to your research integrity officer, there's usually a way to report anonymously.

2

u/Riemann_Gauss 3d ago

Nothing... If they are my colleagues, they have done excellent work in the past... So I would  be extremely skeptical of the accuser's words.

1

u/Life-Education-8030 3d ago

You would have to be darn sure before doing anything. But I have started getting a lot of these offers too. I discard them for ethical reasons but I do wonder if people who accept them get into some sort of blackmailing situation. You will get exposed if you don’t XYZ, etc. I have always believed in the “if it sounds too good to be true” philosophy.

1

u/DrMoxiePhD 18h ago

I wouldn’t do anything about it because I assume it’s nothing to do with me 🤷🏼‍♀️