It appears to be an issue with fraudulent “translation services” that pose on behalf of the foreign language researcher and use the “suggested reviewer” feature in the submission process to mislead editors into contacting reviewers who aren’t who they claim to be. The BMC blog post http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bmcblog/2015/03/26/manipulation-peer-review/ <http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bmcblog/2015/03/26/manipulation-peer-review/> explains the fraud. My insight is that this could be happening elsewhere, and that BMC is doing the right thing to bring it to light, given the potential tarnish it creates.
David Mellor Center for Open Science <http://centerforopenscience.org/> (434) 352-1066 @EvoMellor > On Mar 27, 2015, at 2:29 PM, Martin Meiss <mme...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I wonder if part of the problem is that one publisher, BioMed Central, > <http://www.biomedcentral.com/about> puts out 277 journals. That seems > like a lot of concentration of power. > > Martin M. Meiss > > 2015-03-27 12:46 GMT-04:00 David Inouye <ino...@umd.edu>: > >> I hope this hasn't been an issue in ecology. >> >> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/03/ >> 27/fabricated-peer-reviews-prompt-scientific-journal-to- >> retract-43-papers-systematic-scheme-may-affect-other-journals/ >>
