The editorial explanations themselves display a high degree of unacknowledged self-duplication: This recent drainpipe-gurgling swirl of retractions seems to be part of that inquiry, for similar reasons motivated the depublications… combinations of piracy from unpublished manuscripts false authorship and falsified peer review. As this investigation is still ongoing, we are unable to disclose how the corresponding author of the retracted papers may have obtained unpublished material.” “We conducted an extensive investigation and found evidence that the peer-review process for a number of articles in MTAP may have been manipulated. By now also this has changed: Xiong is not listed on the university’s leadership webpage anymore, but still features as an Associate Professor there.Īt the time, the MTAP management promised a broader investigation: He removed scrubbed his plagiarism record from his ResearchGate profile, and his latest appearance on internet was from November 2018 when he was mentioned as the Vice Dean of the School of Electrical and Optoelectronic Engineering of Changzhou Institute of Technology. More to the point: the nanotech guy did claim credit for the plagiarisms in his ResearchGate entry.Īfter Retraction Watch reported the retraction of his three mysteriously plagiarized papers in August 2018, Xiong quieted reduced his internet presence. Any thoughts that there might be two Chao Xiongs at the Changzhou Institute of Technology – one toiling in the groves of nanotech while the other robbed researchers – were dispelled by the presence of Acknowledgements, in the plagiarised papers and in ones by the optoelectronics Chao Xiong, to the same regional research grants. All credit to him for branching out into a new area, but he seems an unlikely choice for a peer-reviewer, so how he had access to the manuscripts he acquired was a mystery. Now cursory inquiries revealed that Chao Xiong is a specialist in the nano-fields of thin-film deposition and opto-electronics. There are four authors in common to all three manuscripts, but only one - corresponding author Chao Xiong of the Changzhou Institute of Technology in China - has responded to any queries from MTAP, according to the retraction notices. Multimedia Tools and Applications (MTAP), has retracted three papers by the same group of authors, all of which plagiarized from unpublished manuscripts by other people. In fact this happened three times, with the same team of authorial frauds. Authors had submitted manuscripts for editorial consideration, only to see them rejected (after long delays) on the advice of anonymous reviewers, then promptly appear in the same journal as the work of other authors.

No doubt this has its devoted readership of experts in multi-format cross-media data integration and analysis, but outside that circle, MTAP is perhaps best known for the ‘peer-review piracy’ episode last year. The journal in question was Multimedia Tools & Applications, MTAP for short, published by Springer.

Also, there are digital doppelgangers and glitches in the Matrix! Here I may be working the Retraction Watch side of the street, but the story provides enough entertainment for everyone. When a journal retracts 14 papers at once – the entire contents of a Special Issue – something is probably happening behind the scenes. Springer secretly ashamed, Elsevier lets it all hang out By Smut Clyde and Tiger BB8 The following guest post by Smut Clyde and Tiger BB8 illustrates nicely how diseased scholarly publishing has become, to serve perverse career incentives in academia and apparently also in the industry. In any case, the journal editors seem to have discreetly looked away at all times, and one thing is certain: anti-plagiarism screens are definitely not being applied by these IT experts, like the Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation Editor in Chief Zicheng Liu from Microsoft. Well, maybe there are, because the re-published paper was originally plagiarised, i.e. And if a Springer paper is retracted, there are no copyright issues standing in the way of republication with Elsevier. One needs filler material for journals which nobody seems to read or even to edit, in order to sell subscriptions. Smut Clyde, X-Ray Haruspex May 19, 2019Įlsevier on the other hand cannot be bothered, what others perceive as a shameful embarrassment, is a money-making opportunity for the market leader RELX. I suppose 'Multimedia Tools and Applications' Īnd 'Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation' Īre the appropriate outlets for publishing glitches in the Matrix.

Multimedia tools and applications