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When APCs Become Authorship Currency: What This Case Reveals About a Deeper Integrity Crisis
The recent Retraction Watch report describing the removal of legitimate contributors and the addition of unfamiliar coauthors who “kindly covered” publication fees is unsettling, but not surprising. What makes this case especially instructive is not merely the alleged misconduct itself, but how clearly it exposes a set of structural weaknesses in contemporary scholarly publishing.
At its core, this is not just an authorship dispute. It is a case study in how article processing charges (APCs), reputational incentives, editorial opacity, and weak authorship governance can converge to produce outcomes that are ethically indefensible yet procedurally difficult to prevent.
Authorship as a Transaction, Not a Contribution
The most troubling feature of this case is the apparent reframing of authorship from a record of intellectual contribution into a negotiable asset, one that can be exchanged for funding, access, or institutional advantage.
The idea that authorship might be adjusted because someone “covered the APC” is not merely unethical; it fundamentally undermines the epistemic function of authorship itself. Authorship is meant to communicate responsibility, accountability, and contribution, as articulated in widely accepted guidelines such as the ICMJE authorship criteria.
When authorship becomes a form of currency, the scholarly record no longer reflects how knowledge was produced, only who could afford to appear on it.
This phenomenon is not confined to any single country or institution. APC-driven authorship distortions have been reported globally, particularly in environments where:
- Publication volume is directly tied to institutional ranking or career progression
- APCs are high relative to local research funding
- Editorial scrutiny of contribution statements is minimal
The present case simply makes these dynamics unusually visible.
Contribution Statements: Detailed, Yet Toothless
Ironically, this case includes highly detailed authorship contribution statements, multiple versions of them, in fact. Yet those statements failed to prevent what appears to be a wholesale misrepresentation of scholarly labor.
This raises an uncomfortable question: What value do contribution taxonomies (such as CRediT) really provide if journals do not verify them, audit them, or act decisively when they change dramatically between submissions?
When an author list changes substantially, especially after prior rejections, this should trigger mandatory scrutiny, not passive acceptance. At present, however, most journals treat contribution statements as declarative rather than evidentiary. They are collected, not interrogated.
Editorial Blind Spots and the Limits of Trust
Publishers often emphasize that editors must “trust authors” to describe contributions accurately. Trust is essential, but trust without verification is not governance.
In this case, the published article appears to be nearly identical to an earlier draft that clearly documented the contributions of excluded authors. If accurate, this suggests a failure not just of authorship ethics, but of editorial due diligence despite existing guidance from bodies such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE):
- No apparent inquiry into why prior corresponding authors disappeared
- No documented explanation for the sudden appearance of new senior authors
- No reconciliation of contradictory funding declarations across submissions
These are not subtle discrepancies. They are precisely the kinds of red flags that editorial systems should be designed to detect.
Metric Pressure and the Manufacturing of Legitimacy
The institutional backdrop matters. The repeated appearance of the same actors in prior investigations into metric manipulation suggests a deeper problem: the industrialization of publication output as a ranking strategy.
When institutions reward volume over validity, and when journals prioritize throughput over provenance, misconduct becomes less an aberration and more a rational adaptation to incentives.
This does not absolve individuals of responsibility, but it does explain why apologies, retractions, and “misunderstandings” recur without meaningful reform.
Retraction as a Necessary—but Insufficient—Response
The request for retraction in this case is reasonable and likely justified. Yet retraction alone is a blunt instrument. It corrects the record after harm is done, but it does little to prevent recurrence.
If publishers want to treat cases like this as more than isolated scandals, several systemic reforms deserve serious consideration:
- Mandatory authorship-change disclosures between submissions, with written justification
- Independent confirmation from all listed and removed authors at the acceptance stage
- Funding–authorship firewall policies, explicitly prohibiting APC payment as a basis for authorship
- Editorial access to prior submission histories, especially when manuscripts migrate between journals
- Sanctions beyond retraction, including temporary submission bans for repeat offenders
None of these measures is radical. All are technically feasible. What has been lacking is institutional will.
A Final Reflection
This case is uncomfortable precisely because it challenges a comforting narrative: that misconduct is rare, accidental, or confined to bad actors. In reality, it often emerges where systems are permissive, incentives are misaligned, and accountability is diffuse.
If the scholarly community wishes to preserve trust in the research record, it must confront a difficult truth: integrity failures are no longer primarily about individual ethics; they are about system design.
And systems, unlike apologies, can be fixed.
Keywords
Research integrity Authorship ethics Article processing charges (APCs) Gift authorship Publication ethics Editorial governance CRediT taxonomy Metric-driven publishing Scholarly misconduct Open-access publishing Retractions Institutional incentives Accountability in research Authorship manipulation
With more than two decades of leadership in scholarly publishing and scientific communication, Muhammad Sarwar has been instrumental in advancing research dissemination across Asia. As Secretary & Treasurer of the Asian Council of Science Editors (ACSE), he has played a pivotal role in promoting editorial excellence, publication ethics, and professional development within the scientific community. He is also a founding member of Open Science Asia, an initiative dedicated to advancing open-access publishing and empowering researchers and institutions to share knowledge freely and responsibly. In addition to his leadership at ACSE, Muhammad heads IndexONE, an abstracting and citation database that provides indexing solutions for both well-established non-indexed and emerging journals—helping them enhance visibility, credibility, and global reach. His leadership reflects a deep commitment to supporting sustainable scholarly communication and strengthening publishing infrastructures in developing regions. With a strong background in editorial management, publishing operations, and research ethics, Muhammad continues to serve as a guiding force in the Asian publishing community, driving integrity, innovation, and inclusivity in scholarly communication.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of their affiliated institutions, the Asian Council of Science Editors (ACSE), or the Editor’s Café editorial team.
