The Church of Impact Factor is selling indulgences

Read on Medium (preferred). Bribery allegations at Cell Press. The open secret of scientific publishing is out. I’m shocked. I’m not surprised. Two million yuan: The price of an indulgence? Two million yuan. That’s the “initial payment” a Chinese clinician says a journal editor asked for to help get a paper published. More fees, the clinician was told, might be required later. Two million yuan is more than a quarter of a million US dollars. For one paper. I read the story in the South China Morning Post a few days ago and I’m still processing it. Not because I didn’t suspect it. Because someone finally said it out loud, with their own name attached. Here’s what happened. On October 12, Rao Yi, a Peking University neurobiologist and former president of Capital Medical University, posted an open letter on his WeChat account, Rao Yi Science (饶议科学). He wrote that some editors at international journals were asking authors for personal payments in exchange for help publishing their papers. The sums, he said, went far beyond normal journal charges, and they went to the editor, not the journal. The two million yuan came from a clinician’s message that Rao quoted in his letter. The next day, he named a name. In a post titled “China should boycott journal editors who solicit and accept bribes,” Rao singled out Steve Mao, editor-in-chief of Cancer Cell, a Cell Press journal boasting a whopping impact factor of 56.1. In the Church of Impact Factor, that’s practically sainthood. Rao wrote that “many people believe Steve Mao has serious issues” and called on Chinese scientists to stop submitting to and reviewing for the journal until Mao resigns or is dismissed. Mao categorically denies the allegations. In an email exchange that Rao made public, Mao called the allegation “completely false and baseless,” demanded a retraction, and said he had “preserved all evidence” and reserved all rights. Rao refused to retract and said he would welcome a lawsuit. Cell Press, which belongs to Elsevier, moved surprisingly fast. For a publisher. On October 16, it announced that it had commissioned “an external, independent third party to conduct a comprehensive investigation” and would not comment further while it runs. By the next morning, Mao’s name had disappeared from the academic committee of a Westlake–Cell Press tumour biology conference scheduled for November in Hangzhou. Let me be clear about what we know and what we don’t. These are allegations. They are second-hand: Rao says he heard them from several people who had no reason to lie, but he hasn’t published evidence. Mao is entitled to the presumption of innocence, and the investigation must run its course. But one editor is the least interesting part of this story. The real scandal is the system that made the allegation so easy to believe.