Laura Schaefer Googled herself to find her ORCID researcher ID for a paper submission. To her surprise, a paper popped up with her name in a journal she’d never published in. Her surprise quickly turned to concern – had someone copied one of her articles? As she searched the site where the work appeared, she found more articles with her name, covering subjects she had never written about and with co-authors she didn’t know.
Schaefer found a total of four papers bearing her name, on topics far from her expertise such as agriculture and waste disposal. The articles appeared in the Journal of Robotics Spectrum, Journal of Machine and Computing and Journal of Computing and Natural Science, all titles belonging to a publisher in Kenya called AnaPub. None of the journals is indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science.
In emails seen by Retraction Watch, Rice’s lawyers demanded AnaPub remove the publications immediately and threatened a lawsuit for fraud. In a response on July 29, Ogutu said AnaPub has given “Mr. Laura Schaefer” 60 days to verify their identity. Schaefer and her team at Rice have not heard from Ogutu or anyone at AnaPub since. All four papers remain on AnaPub’s website credited to Laura Schaefer.
