(8 Sept 2025) Earlier this year, China’s supreme court said companies selling fake or low-quality research papers should be punished. But shady middlemen there continue to offer questionable deals to journal editors across the globe in a bid to secure publications for their customers, emails obtained by Retraction Watch suggest.
In the emails, sent between May and August and using the same boilerplate language, the Nanjing-based agency A-Techo said it would pay an “expedited processing fee” of $500 to $1,000 US “per accepted manuscript to support the review process.”
According to its website, the company provides various types of publication support. Signatures in the correspondence we obtained listed different names of purported assistant editors, who said they were “writing on behalf of an academic institution that supports Ph.D. researchers and faculty in publishing high-quality research.”
Some journals allow authors to pay a fee to fast-track the editorial processing of their manuscripts. But when A-Techo’s proposition landed in the inbox of Ilka Agricola, an editor of the Journal of the European Mathematical Society, she had no doubt about the underlying motive.
Read more from Retraction Watch here.
