On November 12, 2024 Richard Addante, an associate editor at the journalFrontiers in Psychology, received an alarming email from someone purporting to be a faculty member at a university in China: "I have a lot of papers to publish, papers on computers, medicine, materials, and so on. If you can help me publish my paper, I’ll pay you $1500 as a referral fee."
Other editors in the United States and Europe have also received bribery proposals from the same Chinese email account in recent weeks. A long-known hotbed for paper mills, China has recently taken steps to curtail academic fraud. But observers say it remains business as usual there.
A joint investigation by Science and Retraction Watch earlier this year found paper mills in China and elsewhere have been bribing editors and planting agents on editorial boards for years.
