Tag: predatory publishing

Linköping University and Tiwari’s predatory conferences

Linköping University and Tiwari’s predatory conferences

The predatory conferences organised by the team around Ashutosh Tiwari, fake professor of Linköping University (LiU) in Sweden, became now a comparatively modest affair, after my reporting set several misconduct investigations at LiU in motion and even alerted Swedish and international media. Tiwari stopped pretending being a LiU professor and even ceased signing his conference invitations. Internet announcements for his conference scams became rather minimalistic, while conference programmes or lists of speakers are not released to participants and are apparently arranged on the spot.

Since my last reporting on the Tiwari case, several things happened. Tiwari’s patron, LiU professor Anthony “Tony” Turner retired from this faculty position, his former division at LiU’s Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology (IFM) is has a new head. Turner now works with a biotech start-up Innovosens, in Malmö, Sweden, and remains Editor-in-Chief of his Elsevier journal, Biosensors and Bioelectronics. And it was in this journal that his former protégé Tiwari suffered two retractions, from a 2017 journal issue which he himself edited, no less. Even Turner’s boasting of full support by Elsevier against troll accusations didn’t protect Tiwari. All thanks to his data-faking friend from Allahabad, Prashant Sharma, whose seven papers were now mass-retracted just from Biosensors and Bioelectronics alone, following the guest post on my site by Smut Clyde.

LiU issued two press releases (here and here) to announce investigations and that Tiwari was never their professor, yet the university proved unable to dissociate itself from Tiwari’s predatory conferences as of yet. Mikael Syväjärvi, Tiwari’s probably closest business associate, was permitted to continue run their predatory conference and publishing business while officially at his work place as LiU employee. At least Syväjärvi doesn’t present himself as professor anymore, as he occasionally used to. Continue reading “Linköping University and Tiwari’s predatory conferences” →

How scam artist Ashutosh Tiwari played Linköping University

How scam artist Ashutosh Tiwari played Linköping University

The Linköping University (LiU) in Sweden is quite busy these days with the affair around their fake professor Ashutosh Tiwari, trying to figure out what actually happened inside their own Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology (IFM). How could a person with some very shady claims to a doctorate, a publication list consisting mostly of papers in his own private predatory journal, titles and awards from his own fake research institutions and predatory conferences fool the system for years in this way? How could he get the prestigious Marie-Curie fellowship, which in turn delivered him a habilitation degree of Docent at LiU and grant money from Swedish public? In this regard, how could he have just last year been awarded funding from the Swedish Research Council, Vetenskapsrådet (VR) if he wasn’t even employed at LiU or anywhere else since early 2015?

The answer is: with bold chutzpah and even bolder support from certain Swedish professors. First and foremost, from his mentor, the LiU bioelectronics professor Anthony “Tony” Turner, who conveniently accepted a large number of Tiwari-coauthored papers in his Elsevier journal Bionsensors and Bioelectronics, and played a key role in Tiwari being awarded the Marie-Curie fellowship and the docent degree. Others helped along, a recommendation letter from a Malmö biochemistry professor proves a particularly bizarre piece of evidence of how Tiwari’s fraud was interpreted as superhuman genius achievements. Continue reading “How scam artist Ashutosh Tiwari played Linköping University” →

Christmas messages from Professor Turner, his ex-protégé under investigation Tiwari, and Elsevier

Christmas messages from Professor Turner, his ex-protégé under investigation Tiwari, and Elsevier

My earlier article about the fake Linköping University professor Ashutosh Tiwari and his scam of predatory conferences and journals, made quite a splash. Swedish Linköping University (LiU) now opened an investigation into research misconduct and other “improprieties” of their past employee Tiwari. The investigation is likely to include his past patron, bioelectronics professor Anthony “Tony” Turner, whose Christmas message to the research community I relay below, followed by the LiU announcement. Since Turner is also Editor-in-Chief on an Elsevier journal Bionsensors and Bioelectronics, his message quotes a statement from Elsevier, which describes yours truly as a “toxic individual”, with whom Elsevier advises their academic editors to keep contact ” to the absolute minimum”.

On top, Tiwari himself sent a bizarre round email which I also quote below. His empire of fake research institutes and predatory publisher VBRI Press as well as his predatory conference outlet IAAM (International Association of Advanced Materials), all located in a small rented office in the vicinity of LiU, are apparently crumbling. Websites of Tiwari’s businesses get scrubbed, videos of the duped participants of his scam conferences get pulled off YouTube. I received meanwhile an English-language report of a misconduct investigation LiU performed on Tiwari’s activities in October 2015, terminated without conclusion simply because he was not officially employed at LiU at that time anymore. Only that Tiwari didn’t really leave after his contract expired in March 2015. He stayed at Turner’s Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology (IFM), according to Turner himself until June 2017, while witnesses reported the fake professor still having his office, as well as a research group of graduate students long after he was supposed to have left LiU. Where, as witnesses told me, Tiwari made them surrender all their research data to him, even if it was produced outside LiU. Tiwari then published the data under his own name, even when he had no input whatsoever in that research. In fact, these students quickly noticed how little clue the fake professor had of the science he was supposed to be a great expert in.

Others reported that Tiwari engaged in plagiarism, by translating foreign language papers of other authors and publishing them in English as his own. Finally, Tiwari allegedly told to his students that his own PhD research at the University of Allahabad took mere three months and that his father paid for his doctorate diploma, which Tiwari then used to obtain a Marie Curie fellowship in 2011 and a “docent” (habilitation) degree at LiU, together with a lecturer position in 2013.  All thanks to his patron Turner, whose journal Bionsensors and Bioelectronics published a large number of very shady papers by Tiwari and his Allahabad partner and probably the laziest of all cheaters, Prashant Sharma (see this report). Continue reading “Christmas messages from Professor Turner, his ex-protégé under investigation Tiwari, and Elsevier” →

Predatory conferences and other scams of false Swedish professor Ashutosh Tiwari

Predatory conferences and other scams of false Swedish professor Ashutosh Tiwari

Previously I reported on my site about the Indian nanotechnology researcher Prashant Sharma, whose collection of blatantly manipulated papers seems to grow daily on PubPeer. The article prompted two scientists from Sweden to contact me about a certain Sharma associate who was only briefly mentioned there: Ashutosh Tiwari, a former employee of the Linköping University (LiU) in Sweden. Tiwari built an entire industry of predatory publishing and conferences, which hosted many among the material science research elite, all from a small rented office in the industrial area of Linköping. Tiwari’s genius trick was to play at the vanity and greed of certain academics: all he had to do to get them to participate at his conferences and to help divert public money via conference fees into his pocket, was to offer a luxurious holiday-style venue (like a cruise ship) and hand them some ridiculous made-up awards, diploma and medals.

As it looks, Tiwari never was professor in Linköping or possibly anywhere else, in fact he arrived at LiU in 2011 as Marie-Curie postdoctoral fellow, assigned to the lab of Professor Anthony Turner, Editor-in-Chief of Biosensors and Bioelectronics, who somehow published a number of fraudulent papers by Tiwari’s associate Sharma and eventually became an invited speaker, co-organiser and even advertiser for Tiwari’s conferences. Even Tiwari’s doctorate is not certain: around 2015, Linköping University was investigating the validity of his PhD degree. Now, LiU finds itself unable to give me a straightforward answer about their scientist’s academic credentials. It is not even clear when Tiwari’s employment at LiU ended: my source says 2015, Turner says in summer 2017.

Yet to the scientific community and even his colleagues working at LiU, Tiwari presented himself since 2011 as “Associate Professor” of Linköping University, at Turner’s Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology (IFM). The Sweden-based Indian scam artist, whose scientific career began with data manipulation (as the evidence below proves), was and still is running many businesses:

  • a phony Vinoba  Bhave Research Institute (VBRI) in Allahabad, India (just where Sharma is located, working however at the really existent Indian School of Mines). This Tiwari-led research “institute” invites applications of PhD students and postdocs, but uses fraudulent photos to pretend it actually exists. The institute now has a Swedish branch, the Insitute of Advanced Materials, led by director Tiwari and located in a small rented office in Linköping
  • a predatory publishing outlet VBRI Press, located in the same office in Linköping, which used to be even DOAJ-listed, though its editorial team of young women is fake, with their photos stolen off internet, while VBRI press’ only peer reviewer is Tiwari himself
  • a so-called International Association of Advanced Materials (IAAM), also located in the same mailbox in Linköping, which only purpose is to organize predatory conferences, preferably on luxury cruise ships. The conference fees for Advanced Materials World Congress, European Advanced Materials Congress, American Advanced Materials Congress etc flow to the same VBRI mailbox owned only by Tiwari and his wife.

Continue reading “Predatory conferences and other scams of false Swedish professor Ashutosh Tiwari” →

Frontiers: vanquishers of Beall, publishers of bunk

Frontiers: vanquishers of Beall, publishers of bunk

It is now quasi official: do not mess with Frontiers. My earlier reporting made it a credible possibility that this Swiss publisher was behind the January 2017 shut-down and removal of Jeffrey Beall’s list of “potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers”, and it was now indeed verified by an article in Chronicle of Higher Education. The librarian Beall used to be constantly under attack from Open Access (OA) publishers who were unhappy about his personal opinions and his private decisions to place them on his blog list. With those, his University of Colorado in Denver supported Beall. But the trouble started when he placed in October 2015 the Swiss publisher Frontiers onto his list, thus effectively declaring this Holtzbrinck-owned outlet a predatory publisher, after hearing of scientists’ complaints and reading my reports. To be fair, Frontiers are still defended by a much bigger number of scientists who see the advantage of having a reliable business partner who will publish certain manuscripts which hardly any respectable journal might consider.  Especially certain kinds of psychologists figured out that with the life-science-oriented Frontiers they can easily get merited as proper neuroscientists, or even biomedical polymaths (e.g., here). Regardless of the bunk they place there for $2500 a pop.

Frontiers first tried it nicely with Beall, when the Chief Executive Officer Frederick Fenter and journal manager Mirjam Curno (who is also trustee at Committee for Publication Ethics, COPE, read here) visited the librarian before Christmas 2016 in Denver (see my report here). Since Beall still did not remove Frontiers from his list, Fenter rallied its loyal journal editors and started together with them in August 2016 a campaign against Beall, demanding that his university punishes the librarian or at least forces him to remove Frontiers from his private list (read here). That information on my site served as (utterly uncredited) template for the aforementioned Chronicle of Higher Education article (as its author Paul Basken admitted to me, but his editor Brock Read denied). Basken then contacted Beall, who then also revealed to him that in January 2016 the University of Colorado Denver caved in to Frontiers demands and opened a misconduct case against its librarian. At this point, Beall decided to delete his list and save his job. An academic disagreement was resolved in a honed and cherished academic tradition: with a call to the employer and a threat of sacking.

Continue reading “Frontiers: vanquishers of Beall, publishers of bunk” →

The Costs of Knowledge: scientists want their cut on the scam

The Costs of Knowledge: scientists want their cut on the scam

When the mathematician Timothy Gowers, with some co-signers, started in 2012 his initiative “The Costs of Knowledge” to boycott Elsevier for their business practices, he was hoping to release science from the grip of commercial publishers. His reasoning went: with academics boycotting Elsevier en masse as authors, reviewers and editors, the commercial publisher would be forced to change its greedy ways, or the universities would separate themselves from the blackmail-like practice of Elsevier subscriptions (not that Springer, Wiley or others are much better in that regard). Meanwhile only 16800 people signed The Cost of Knowledge pledge, and some renounced on it silently. Open Access (OA) movement gained speed at roughly the same time, originally with the goal of reducing publication costs. Exactly the opposite was achieved, in fact what subscription publishers did was to usurp the OA movement for their greedy purpose, by subsidising OA conferences and feeding the egos of or simply doing business with those most vocal OA proponents. By now, same megapublishers sell so-called Gold OA on top or in addition to subscriptions; SpringerNature and Elsevier became world’s biggest and second -biggest OA publishers, respectively.

University library budgets are near breakpoint, in fact Germany just now cancelled Elsevier subscriptions, in a desperate attempt to negotiate a better deal which would include both subscriptions and OA article-processing charges (APC). But some academics seem to have a different viewpoint on how to respond to publishers ripping off their own research institutions. They want their cut on the scam, namely to be paid for their peer review services. The idea is: since peer reviewing duties are not directly specified as such in faculty employment contracts, they must be then not a part of research activities, but a kind of voluntary charity to your peers, or in fact to commercial publishers. As journals and their for-profit owners (because even academic society-run journals are for-profit) make such big money publishing peer reviewed research, the peer reviewers want their share. And they don’t seem to spare a thought if science gets damaged beyond repair in the process.

incompetent referee

Continue reading “The Costs of Knowledge: scientists want their cut on the scam” →

Beall-listed Frontiers empire strikes back

Beall-listed Frontiers empire strikes back

The Swiss publishing business Frontiers was placed by the US librarian Jeffrey Beall on his well-known and hotly disputed list as “potential, possible or probable predatory publisher”. Frontiers however was not prepared to take this lying down. The publisher’s Executive Editor Frederick Fenter first tried it nicely. Shortly before Christmas 2015, he flew to visit Beall at his University of Colorado in Denver, with the senior manager Mirjam Curno in tow. Curno is incidentally also board member and trustee of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Afterwards, Fenter stopped being nice. In August 2016, he bombarded around ten senior officials at the University Colorado in Denver with letters and a dossier (see below) demanding that they make sure Frontiers is removed from their employee’s private list.

Thing is: University of Colorado has nothing to do with the so-called Beall’s List. The list is part of the librarians private blog on WordPress (same platform I use). In fact, this is the disclaimer which Beall placed on his site clear for all to see:

“These views represent the personal opinions of the author (Jeffrey Beall)  and may not reflect the position of the University of Colorado Denver or the University of Colorado System”.

Continue reading “Beall-listed Frontiers empire strikes back” →