Publisher discovers 50 academic papers accepted based on fake peer reviews

If anyone wants a good idea for a startup in the academic journals space, I'd recommend looking into vetting peer reviewers as part of the article submission/review process. There have been a few high profile cases of people faking their peer reviews recently. At Sage we dealt with a big case of that earlier in the year and retracted 60 papers. This new case in the posted article seems like it involves 5 published papers and a bunch that got caught before being published. Note that both those cases (and some more) use ScholarOne as the submission management platform.

In particular, the new hotness in the academic journal world is open access journals, and OA journals need to be particularly careful about bad stuff slipping through peer review. A few OA journals from Hindawi just lost their impact factor (source: http://scholarlyoa.com/2014/10/14/the-scientific-world-journ...), not due to outright peer review fraud, but due to other "abnormal citation patterns". For OA journals getting or losing an impact factor has a HUGE impact on the # of submissions (which are directly tied to revenue), so there's a big need to ensure you don't get caught with your pants down when it comes to the peer review process. So if you had a product that gave a publisher higher confidence in the integrity of the peer review process I imagine you'd be able to get a number of bites from big and small publishers alike.