In the summer of 2020, Anna Abalkina came across an advertisement online: a website was selling authorship of a chemistry paper that it said was to be published in a reputable journal in February 2021. The ad didn’t come as a surprise to Abalkina, a sociologist at the Free University of Berlin, because she had been tracking such advertisements for a while. The whole story was published by C&EN Magazine.
IMAGE: Martin aka Maha — Flickr