Retraction blackmail – new service by Iranian papermills

Iranian papermillers extended their business model with a blackmail option. After you paid them for your authorship on whatever papermill product they had on sale, they wait till the paper is published and then report it to journal or publisher for fraud. If the journal investigates and contacts the authors about impending retraction, the Iranian criminal contacts the authors also, demanding a hefty ransom to prevent this retraction.

The moral is: don’t buy from papermills, but I guess some have to learn it the hard way.

And this is how the story unfolded, from the end.

An interesting retraction was recently published in MDPI, for an intentional team of papermillers, from Kuwait, Peru, India, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Poland and Czechia.

Abeer Anazi , Luis Barboza-Arenas , Rosario Romero-Parra , Ramaswamy Sivaraman , Maytham Qasim , Sara Al-Khafaji , Maher Gatea , Reza Alayi , Waqas Farooq , Michał Jasiński , Zbigniew Leonowicz , Filip Novak , Radomir Gono Investigation and Evaluation of the Hybrid System of Energy Storage for Renewable Energies Energies (2023) doi: 10.3390/en16052337 

The retraction notice from 19 July 2024 stated:

“The journal Energies retracts the article “Investigation and Evaluation of the Hybrid System of Energy Storage for Renewable Energies” [1] cited above. Following publication, concerns were brought to the attention of the publisher regarding overlap with a previously published manuscript [2] with a different authorship group and published in another language. Adhering to our complaint procedure, an investigation was conducted by the Editorial Office, members of the Editorial Board, and the Editor-in-Chief that confirmed a significant overlap. This article [1] is therefore retracted.

This retraction was approved by the Editor-in-Chief of Energies.

Maytham T. Qasim agrees to this retraction. Luis Andres Barboza-Arenas, Rosario Mireya Romero-Parra, Zbigniew Leonowicz and Radomir Gono disagree to this retraction. The remaining authors did not provide a comment on this decision.”

The original paper which the papermillers stole from was Khazali, Azarsina, Haj MollaAli Kani 2022, published in Persian in an Iranian journal. This information will become important later.

Let us look at the authors. The Iraqi Maytham T. Qasim (the one who agreed with the retraction) is definitely a professional, his PubPeer record of buying and selling citations to his and crooks’ papermill garbage, does suggest that. This one of Qasim’s has also been retracted, dedicated For Better Science readers will applaud in recognition of the first two authors:

Dmitry Olegovich Bokov , Abduladheem Turki Jalil , Forat H. Alsultany , Mustafa Z. Mahmoud , Wanich Suksatan , Supat Chupradit , Maytham T. Qasim , Parvaneh Delir Kheirollahi Nezhad Ir-decorated gallium nitride nanotubes as a chemical sensor for recognition of mesalamine drug: a DFT study Molecular Simulation (2022) doi: 10.1080/08927022.2021.2025234 

“Since publication, significant concerns have been raised about the use of irrelevant references, the authorship, source of this article, and the significant similarity in the results and conclusion of this article to other sources”

Retraction 22 November 2023.

Yes, the russian papermill ork Dmitry Bokov and Abduladheem Turki Jalil (who may even operate a papermill), plus their papermilling associates Wanich Suksatan and Supat Chupradit (who were apparently just sacked in Thailand for papermilling).

You get the message about Qasim. The PubPeer record of the University of Peru professor Rosario Mireya Romero Parra proves beyond all doubt that she buys from papermills. There are papers by Turki Jalil, in fact also the co-corresponding author of the retracted MDPI study, Luis Andres Barboza-Arenas (another professor of University of Peru), is on one retraction:

Omar Dheyauldeen Salahdin , Hamidreza Sayadi , Reena Solanki , Rosario Mireya Romero Parra , Mohaimen Al-Thamir , Abduladheem Turki Jalil , Samar Emad Izzat , Ali Thaeer Hammid , Luis Andres Barboza Arenas , Ehsan Kianfar Graphene and carbon structures and nanomaterials for energy storage Applied Physics A (2022) doi: 10.1007/s00339-022-05789-2  

How to cite properly:

YM Chu and C. Li are two very notorious citation buyers. And the authorships for that paper were sold on the internet. Romero Perra is 4th author, she must have paid $600:

The retraction notice from 29 February 2024 indicates Romero-Parra was added after peer review, and so was probably Barboza-Arenas:

“The Editor-in-Chief has retracted this article because of substantial overlaps with previously-published papers by different authors [1,2,3]. Additionally, an investigation by the Publisher has found a number of articles, including this one, which share similar concerns, involving but not limited to, irregularities with respect to submission and authorship.”

Another one by Romero-Parra and Barboza-Arenas, again with evidence of authorships being sold on internet:

Widodo Brontowiyono , Indrajit Patra , Shaymaa Abed Hussein , Alimuddin Alimuddin , Ahmed B. Mahdi , Samar Emad Izzat , Dhuha Mohsin Al-Dhalemi , Ahmed Kareem Obaid Aldulaim , Rosario Mireya Romero Parra , Luis Andres Barboza Arenas , Yasser Fakri Mustafa Phosphate Ion Removal from Synthetic and Real Wastewater Using MnFe2O4 Nanoparticles: A Reusable Adsorbent Acta chimica Slovenica (2022) doi: 10.17344/acsi.2022.7594 

And one more with the two Peruvian scammers, kind of sad Barboza-Arenas paid $550 for his name on a preprint on ResearchSquare:

Indah Raya , Usama S. Altimari , Baraa G. Alami , Seelam Srika , M. Abdulfadhil Gatea , Rosario Mireya Romero-Parra , Luis Andres Barboza-Arenas , Yasser Fakri Mustafa Synthesis of Rizatriptan Analogues via the Fischer Indole Synthesis in the Presence of Sustainable Natural Deep Eutectic Solvents and Catalyst Research Square Platform LLC (2023) doi: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-2930130/v1 

I could continue, but Peruvian journalists of El Comercio already cracked the case a year ago (Google-translated):

“A newspaper report showed that some Professors from Peruvian universities have chosen to pay sums of money to appear as co-authors in scientific research , since this allows them to access bonuses granted by their study centers.

The “Punto Final” program indicated that private universities grant bonuses of 5,000 to 9,000 soles to professors who publish research in international scientific journals , while in national universities half an extra salary is given.

According to the report, professors pay to appear as co-authors of research carried out in other countries and their alleged co-authors are from Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan. […]

“Punto Final” showed the case of Rosario Mireya Romero Parra, who has a bachelor’s degree in Education, a master’s degree in Higher Education and a doctorate in Educational Sciences, but the most notable thing is that she appears as a co-author in dozens of scientific investigations in Mainly medical topics. These are indexed in magazines and she signs them with the seal of Continental University. When consulted, Romero did not know how to explain her contribution to the research and she did not remember the names of her co-authors.

However, the Continental University indicated that it became aware of the purchase of scientific co-authorships and found it responsible , so it let her go in August.”

There is even a video about Romero-Parra’s papermilling:

Let’s turn to the European authors of the retracted MDPI study. There are four of them:

Michał Jasiński, professor of the University of Ostrava in Czechia, and his faculty colleagues Filip Novak and Radomir Goňo. Jasinksi and Gono also declare a second affiliation at the Wroclaw University of Science and Technology in Poland, and this is where the main affiliation of the second co-corresponding author, Zbigniew Leonowicz, is. As it happens, Leonowicz has also a second affiliation (his Polish CV however says it was active in 1996 only) at the Sapienza University of Rome in Italy. Where lots of papermilling happens, read here:

Jasinski’s publication and citation index was microscopic until 2020, but then it exploded (see his Google Scholar). Same is true for Leonowicz and for Gono. They often publish together, accompanied by two former postdocs. One, Arsalan Najafi, who claimed to be associate professor at the Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, is now postdocking again at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. The other Iranian postdoc was Omid Homaee, who was “supported by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA) under the Ulam Program Grant“. He is now at Nottingham Trent University, which is definitely a special place:

Another fun fact about Michal Jasinksi: he seems to have a brother named Marek Jasiński (affiliated with Wroclaw University of Applied Informatics “Horizon”), as evidenced by this MDPI paper Khanna et al 2021, with both Jasinski brothers, Leonowicz, two Indians, and two russians including a Vadim Bolshev, who in turn seems to be running a little authorship-for sale business with a certain Pavel Kuznetsov. When russia began its genocidal full-scale war on Ukraine, Polish scientists stopped collaborating with russians, but not Marek Jasinksi. See his MDPI paper Kuznetsov et al 2022, submitted in August 2022. In fact, that paper seems to be a translated copy of the russian language paper Kuznetsov & Kotelnikov 2022, as Alexander Magazinov found out. During translation, Marek Jasinksi, Bolshev, more russians, and a Tunesian author joined.

And as for Leonowicz, well, we communicated before. Someone left a string of comments under my article about papermilling in Poland article, from an IP address in Wroclaw, signing as “ZBIGNIEW LEONOWICZ”, leaving behind Leonowicz’s professional email address.

“Why don’t you touch the greatest one Frede Blaabjerg ???”
“You find a small cheater and meticulosly follow all possible “crimes”, but you don’t touch the biggest mogols like Blaabjerg – the emperor of papermilling”
“Very convenient and safe- persecute poor Iranians, but don’t touch our fabulous West-European honest SCIENTISTS !. Isn’t it a little racist?”

Comment June 5, 2024

Without “poor Iranians”, Leonowicz’s own publication record would be way less impressive. Actually, two years ago, I did publish an article by Alexander Magazinov which mentioned Frede Blaabjerg, that surprisingly productive professor at the Aalborg University in Denmark:

I guess this is a typical Blaabjerg paper:

Saeed Peyghami , Frede Blaabjerg Power Routing: Active Asset Management in Power Electronics Systems IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications (2022) doi: 10.1109/tia.2022.3189329 

“A high number of SELF-CITATIONS (18 times) of the SECOND co-author; perhaps just to boost the citation indices. The FIRST CO-AUTHOR has used 8 times of his SELF-CITATIONS!”

Streblocera villosa

Back on 6 June 2024, the real Leonowicz meekly protested in an email: “I have no idea what you are talking about.” I think he did, look at the authors of this IEEE conference abstract:

Mantosh Kumar , Mahajan Sagar Bhaskar , Sanjeevikumar Padmanaban , Pierluigi Siano , Frede Blaabjerg , Zbigniew Leonowicz Electric field analysis of extra high voltage (EHV) underground cables using finite element method 2017 IEEE International Conference on Environment and Electrical Engineering (2017) doi: 10.1109/eeeic.2017.7977883 

So I wrote to Leonowicz again, on the occasion of that fresh MDPI retraction. Before we get to the main bit, Leonowicz defended his former postdoc Najafi as “a good guy“, who unfortunately left for Sweden because he “wanted more money (higher salary and social benefits)“.

Well, here is a book chapter by this “good guy” with a certain iranian gentleman named Behnam Mohammadi-Ivatloo, professor at LUT University, Finland:

Arsalan Najafi , Ali Masoudian , Behnam Mohammadi-Ivatloo Optimal Capacitor Placement and Sizing in Distribution Networks Studies in Systems, Decision and Control (2020) doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-34050-6_4 

Mohammadi-Ivatloo, like so many proud Iranian science superstars, is an owner of a worrisome PubPeer record of bad science and citation farming to his collaborator, Fazel Mohammadi. One paper of Mohammadi-Ivatloo’s (Nojavan et al 2015) was retracted for self-plagiarism.

And now, it gets really got interesting. The Wroclaw professor told me about that MDPI retraction:

“I was asked to pay in bitcoin to avoid retraction“.

Then, Leonowicz shared with me this email he received on 29 April 2024, signed by “Advocate Alayi Tehran IRAN“:

The demand was to immediately pay $1000 (Bitcoin 0.02337 ) to the Wallet 18h6bk5fxSVNp23qpcyLUtxt4qu7AYq3rr, in order “to delete the paper and stop the procedure for plagiarism“.

Leonowicz explained to me he published in MDPI because “I had money from coupons (earned as reviewer) and because my university is poor and they want us to publish as much as possible – otherwise we would lose our jobs.” He also insisted: “I am not guilty“. And attached this email without explaining who its original recipients were:

“Unfortunately, my colleagues and I fell victim to a fraudster named Reza Alaya [MDPI coauthor Reza Alayi, -LS] (he is from Iran), who also tried to force me to pay a “ransom” in bitcoins for withdrawing the article.
The idea from the “original” article that none of the honest co-authors knew about (written in Persian) was presented by R. Alayi as his own idea for a new article in Energies.
We made calculations, edited the text based on his crooked and often incorrect ideas and stories, a friend made illustrations based on this fraudster’s hand sketches, another person made calculations, and then there were many months of corrections. Everything seemed OK until the article was published.

Then the fraudster reported himself to MDPI and started blackmailing me, then even demanded about PLN 5,900 for “deleting” the article.
The case was not clear, so the retraction lasted as long as 15 months. The correspondence with the editor was prolonged, MDPI did not want to admit that only one fraudster was guilty in this case.

We all carefully checked all the databases, but you can see that the case was staged – because no search engine is able to find similarities in a text in a different language and written in a different alphabet. Only the literature was in English, but literature is usually not checked because it always gives a similarity, which is not plagiarism.

The attitude of MDPI is also strange to me, they refused to conduct a fair procedure, it was written falsely that I was against retraction (and I was the first to demand it in May 2023!)
then it was written that a committee had made a decision, and then it turned out that there was no “ethics committee” at all, and the decision was made only by prof. Sciubba.

All this proves the quagmire that science has become, thanks to open-access and the new Act on Higher Education and Science.

Of course, I am resigning from my job at Wrocław University of Science and Technology and I will no longer engage in studies. I’m retiring and will never publish anything again.

When I started working, my mentor, prof. Tadeusz Łobos always said that one good article per year is too often.
 Today? prof. Josep M. Guerrero, publishes hundreds of articles in magazines a year and no one even wonders how he does it? He is even a role model for young people, he educates crowds of young “scientists” who will write 5,000 articles a year? And there are hundreds of such Guerreros and other Blaabjergs.

I will not mention that the University of Technology threatens scientists if they do not publish at least four articles. for >70 points, they will be thrown out… If you don’t publish like a printer, you can forget about habilitation or the title of professor…”

Linked at the end was a Google Scholar profile of that Josep M. Guerrero.

This Iranian fellow named Reza Alayi of Islamic Azad University was not on my colleagues’ radar yet, except for a case in Frontiers where he acted as reviewer to extort a bunch of citations to himself. But now Alexander Magazinov noticed this retracted paper, where Alayi is the only Iran-affiliated author:

Wajdi Rajhi , Rassol H. Rasheed , Dheyaa J. Jasim , Walid Aich , Badreddine Ayadi , Reza Alayi Energetic and Exergetic Performance Improvement of a Solar Flat Plate Collector Working with Nanofluid Thermal Science and Engineering Progress (2024) doi: 10.1016/j.tsep.2024.102554 

“This article has been withdrawn at the request of the author(s) and/or editor. The Publisher apologizes for any inconvenience this may cause.”

Maybe this is what really is going on. Advanced papermill fraudsters like Reza Alayi first sell authorships, pocket the money and publish a paper, then contact the journal again and report their own paper for fraud in order to extort their “coauthors” for money to prevent retraction.

Maybe, just maybe, Iranian scientists are not your friends, especially when they bring gifts? Leonowicz seems to have learned his lesson.

Or maybe not yet. This was freshly published, on 11 July 2024, by Leonowicz, Jesinski and their amazing Iranian postdoc Homaee:

Mohammad Javad Nasiri , Omid Homaee , Ahmad Gholami , Michal Jasinski , Zbigniew Leonowicz Lightning Transients in Wind Turbines: A Study on How to Segmentize the Tower, Blades, and Grounding Rods IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications (2024) doi: 10.1109/tia.2024.3426470 

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