The Byline Broker Signed Its Sales Pitch With a London Oncologist's Name

The subject line reads “Opportunity to Join as Co-Author in Ongoing High-Impact Research.” The email arrived in August from an outfit calling itself Springer Journals Online, and Retraction Watch later published it in full. It promised projects “approaching the final stages of publication” in journals from Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley and SAGE. It was signed “Dr. Rafael Di Marco Barros, Academic Publication Coordinator.”

Rafael Di Marco Barros exists. He is a lecturer in medical oncology at King’s College London, with affiliations at the University of Cambridge and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust. When Retraction Watch reached him, he said, “I have no affiliations with any journals,” and that he was “entirely unfamiliar” with emails like this one. “I’ve reported it to the fraud office in the U.K.,” he said. “I don’t know what power they will have though.”

Springer Nature, for its part, says the agency “has no connection to our company.” So the solicitation carries two names it had no claim to, a publisher’s and a cancer researcher’s, and it used both to sell bylines.

Positions on papers nobody has seen

The recipient was Richard Fateman, a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley who retired 18 years ago. He told Retraction Watch the email came “out of the blue.” It offered a choice of manuscripts, target journals, timelines and authorship positions, with the publication costs split among the co-authors. Fateman suspected phishing and wrote back to ask, “are you for real?” Then he put his objection in writing: “Your invitation seems unethical – adding my name to the author list of a publication I did not participate in writing.”

The agency replied that the opportunity was “intended for researchers who are willing to participate in the research process,” which it described as reviewing materials and giving substantive feedback in their area of expertise. Its own pitch had already described the projects as nearing the end of the publication process. Set the two documents side by side and what was on offer was a place on the author list of a manuscript the seller said was already written, with a reviewer’s role attached after the fact. Whether any such manuscript exists has not been established. The titles the agency promised to anyone who replied have never been made public.

The rest of the paperwork is no sturdier. According to Retraction Watch, the agency’s website claimed a “95% acceptance rate in target journals” and “500+ journals published.” It listed a New York address on a street that does not exist, along with a phone number carrying a U.K. country code that did not connect. The agency’s Instagram profile is based in Pakistan. Its testimonial came from a “Dr. Aris Thorne,” a name that a 2026 preprint on chatbot-invented experts lists among the recurring fictional names produced by Google’s Gemini. The agency did not answer Retraction Watch’s emailed questions. When a reporter reached someone on the WhatsApp line and gave their name, the person hung up, and later calls went unanswered.

Retraction Watch published on Monday, October 12. By Friday the 16th, the website was gone, and a reader reported a hosting placeholder reading “Future home of something quite cool.” The public domain record shows an update dated October 16 without saying what changed. Retraction Watch could not determine whether the operation had shut down or moved to other channels.

Five publishers on the letterhead, one on the record

Springer Nature has given two statements. For the first story, a spokesperson said its Anti-Piracy and Security Operations Centre was “already aware of this organisation.” For the follow-up, the company said it is “working with the relevant authorities to address this issue.” It did not name the authorities.

The pitch also named Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Wiley and SAGE as destinations for these manuscripts. Neither Retraction Watch report includes a statement from any of the four, and the first does not say whether they were asked.

The agency’s claim is specific enough to answer. It said, in August, that papers were in the final stages at journals owned by these companies, with author positions still open. If that was true, manuscripts were sitting in those submission systems waiting for names to be added late. If it was false, it was a fraud on the buyers as well as on the publishers. Without titles, no publisher can easily confirm either version from the pitch alone. Any check would have to start from the one pattern the pitch implies, a last-minute addition of authors.

The opening the pitch was selling

Late author additions are a documented route in. In September 2023, Frontiers announced it would grant authorship changes after submission “only under exceptional circumstances,” after review by its research integrity unit, and that it would log every request to catch patterns. By then it had retracted 38 papers linked to authorship-for-sale.

The clearest case on file comes from BuyTheBy, a dataset assembled by Reese Richardson and Spencer Hong of Northwestern University and Anna Abalkina of Freie Universität Berlin. In March 2024, an Iraq-based mill advertised slots at $350 to $600 on a paper titled “Optimizing Solar Energy Utilization: Insights on Energy Storage Battery Capacities and Residential Self-Sufficiency,” headed for the Springer Nature journal Energy Systems. The ad said the paper had already passed revision. Energy Systems published a paper with that exact title in September 2024. Its first author, Qusay Hassan, has several retractions tied to late-stage authorship changes.

The dataset as a whole holds more than 18,000 advertisements from seven paper mills, collected between March 2020 and April 2026, listing more than 5,500 unique products. First-author slots ran from $56 to $5,631. “Anything that could be counted toward a reputation is for sale,” Richardson told Retraction Watch. Tim Kersjes, Springer Nature’s head of research integrity, called paper mill activity “adaptive and deliberately opaque.”

The Springer Journals Online email made its economic case in plain terms: the publication charge, split among co-authors, costs each buyer less. The solicitation shows nothing about what any buyer paid or what any journal charged. It does show which pressure the seller expected to work. Writing in Accountability in Research, Francesco Chirico and Katrina Bramstedt described “authorship commerce” as guest authorship linked to bribery, hard to detect and probably underreported. Among its enablers they named the pressure to publish in high-impact open-access journals that often charge high fees. A seller who leads with fee-splitting has read the same incentive structure and built a product on it.

Why the oncology byline matters

This pitch was for papers in technical fields. The market it draws from is not confined to them. In a 2024 Scientific Reports analysis, Simon Porter and Leslie McIntosh of Digital Science modeled the co-author networks that bought authorship tends to produce: collaborators who rarely appear together more than once. They flagged 2,056 researchers whose profiles fit those unusual-author criteria between 2020 and 2022. By 2022, Elsevier had published more than 11,000 publications involving that cohort and Springer Nature more than 5,000. The authors are explicit that fitting the profile “does not in itself mean that an individual researcher has participated in research misconduct.” They also cite an estimate that 2% of all journal submissions come from paper mills.

In biomedicine the damage has been counted. A 2025 PNAS study by Richardson, Luis Amaral and colleagues found that RNA biology subfields compromised by paper mills had retraction rates of around 4 percent, against about 0.1 percent in uncompromised subfields. As Retraction Watch reported, the researchers calculated that only 28.7% of suspected paper-mill products had been retracted. “It’s like emptying an overflowing bathtub with a spoon,” Amaral said.

Medicine has already seen the Springer name used this way. In 2024, a company calling itself “Springer Global Publication” cloned journals including the American Medical Association’s JAMA Ophthalmology, on lookalike domains such as jamanetwork.international and sciencedirects.com. Cloning journals is a different scheme from selling author slots, and nothing in the record connects the two operations. What they share is the borrowed brand, and each borrowed it from the same publisher. Fateman named the cost of a byline nobody earned in one sentence: “One of the side effects of having too many authors is that no one is really taking responsibility for it.”

So far, nobody has. The manuscript titles Springer Journals Online offered to anyone who replied have not surfaced. Springer Nature has not named the authorities it says it is working with. Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Wiley and SAGE have said nothing on the record about whether they have checked their own queues for late author additions. And a fraud report sits with a British office under the name of a King’s College oncologist who says he does not know what that office can do with it.

Sources

1. Retraction Watch, “A company named Springer that isn’t the publisher is offering authorship for sale” (October 12, 2026)
2. Retraction Watch, “‘Springer’ agency website offering authorship for sale goes down following Retraction Watch story” (October 16, 2026)
3. Springer Journals Online solicitation email to Richard Fateman (PDF, via Retraction Watch)
4. Retraction Watch, BuyTheBy paper-mill authorship advertisement dataset (April 23, 2026)
5. Scientific Reports, Porter and McIntosh, “Identifying fabricated networks within authorship-for-sale enterprises” (2024)
6. PNAS, Richardson et al., paper-mill study (2025)
7. Retraction Watch, coverage of the PNAS paper-mill study (August 4, 2025)
8. Accountability in Research, Chirico and Bramstedt, “Authorship commerce: Bylines for sale” (2021)
9. Retraction Watch, “Springer Global Publication” journal-hijacking scam (November 25, 2024)
10. Frontiers, policy to counter authorship-for-sale (September 4, 2023)
11. Brzozowski and Chung, “The Ghost Couple: Correlated LLM Name Priors and Their Haunting of the Web and Academic Publishing” (arXiv preprint, 2026)
12. RDAP domain record for springerjournalsonline.net