China’s government started cracking down on fraudulent scientific journal articles Tuesday in the wake of a pay-t0-publish scandal among researchers.
China will suspend research grants to any scientists caught paying online companies for fake, positive peer reviews.
The crack down was motivated after the scientific journal Tumor Biology issued a mass retraction of 107 Chinese cancer studies in April. The journal found these studies were peer-reviewed by fake researchers who either didn’t exist or had been picked by the reviewee. China’s science ministry funded 17 of the retracted studies.
“If you shut one [website] down, they will just open three others,” Yang Wei, head of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), told Nature. “Our goal is to find the person behind them. You can go online and see lots of them. Different fields are served by different companies.”
The NSFC found and canceled more than 30 of its pending grant applications based on the retracted papers.
More:
http://dailycaller.com/2017/06/20/china-cracks-down-on-fake-science/
