Understanding and Addressing Drivers of Corruption in Academic Publishing

In this chapter, factors that influence and drive different types of corruption in academic publishing are explored. Getting published should be a joyful event, but many academics and researchers feel overwhelmed by pressures to publish research papers, just to stay employed or to gain promotion or tenure. This can lead to salami slicing, duplicate publications, use of predatory journals, fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism. Even more serious corruption of academic publishing, such as peer review fraud, hijacking and impersonation of legitimate journals, guest authorship for payment, and paper mills, can be driven by poorly designed and inappropriate institutional or national incentives such as bonus payments for each paper published, sometimes irrespective of the quality to unfairly boost the publication count of unscrupulous academics. Recommendations are offered about how to challenge the causes of fraud and corruption relating to academic publishing. Applying such knowledge should lead to a reduction in opportunities for unethical exploitation of academic researchers and misappropriation of research funding.