A fake "Springer" offered authorship for sale

Places on author lists were offered for sale under a fake "Springer", and a journal handed a postdoc's name to the authors whose paper he questioned. This week is about names. Plus: what NIH wants to hear about your grant paperwork, and dissertation abstracts a detector flagged as AI-written.

One question before you read on: has anyone ever offered you authorship on a paper you did not work on? Yes, for money · Yes, as a favour · No. A tap opens an email with your answer in it; just press send, or reply with your answer. "No" counts too, and I will share the totals next week, never names.

Erik Founder, Manusights

Have a draft close to submission, or a student who does? Run it through the free check and see the top concerns an editor might flag.

A fake "Springer" offered places on author lists. Here is how to check an offer like it.

In August, Richard Fateman got an email offering him coauthorship on papers it said were approaching the final stages of publication in journals from Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley and SAGE. The coauthors would split the publication costs. Fateman, a computer scientist who retired from the University of California, Berkeley, 18 years ago, wrote back: "Your invitation seems unethical".

The sender called itself Springer Journals Online. Springer Nature told Retraction Watch that the company has no connection to it and that its security team already knew about it. The website gave a New York address on a street that does not exist, a phone number with a UK country code and a testimonial from "Dr. Aris Thorne", a name Retraction Watch describes as favoured by AI models. Four days after Retraction Watch's story, the site went offline.

My read: a retiree can afford to ignore this. A postdoc who needs one more paper before a job application might be tempted.

1. Ask what you would do on the paper. Under the ICMJE criteria, every author makes a substantial contribution to the conception or design of the work, or to acquiring, analysing or interpreting its data; drafts it or critically revises it; approves the final version; and agrees to be accountable for it. ICMJE says authors should meet all four, and paying a share of the publication costs meets none of them. Deciding who is an author is also, in ICMJE's words, "the collective responsibility of the authors, not the journal", so an offer of authorship from a journal, a publisher or an agency is a warning sign in itself.

ICMJE: the four criteria for authorship, joined by AND (icmje.org).

Then, for any email that says it comes from a publisher or a journal:

2. Check the sender against the publisher's own list. Springer Nature says it will only send email from its brands' domains, and its phishing page links to the list. It also warns that addresses can be forged, so a match is a good sign, not proof. For another publisher, find its version of that page yourself.

3. Look up the journal yourself. Open it from the publisher's own website. If you are sent a journal's site, check the title in Retraction Watch's Hijacked Journal Checker, which tracks fake sites that copy real journals' titles and ISSNs.

4. Report it, and do not reply. Springer Nature asks for a suspected spoofed email to be sent as an attachment to the cybersecurity address on that page, and warns that replying only tells the sender your address works. Fateman's reply was fair; the advice is still not to send one. Tell your research integrity office too.

When you do join a paper, your role is written down in its author contributions statement. Our free Submission Declaration Builder drafts one from each author's CRediT roles, in your browser.

Do this today: Bookmark Springer Nature's phishing page and the Hijacked Journal Checker so the next offer is quick to check, and tell your lab the rule: nobody joins a paper they have not worked on.

Reference: Retraction Watch, 12 Oct 2026 · Retraction Watch, 16 Oct 2026 · ICMJE, Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors · Springer Nature, Reporting a Phishing or Spoofed Email · 3 min

Forward this to your lab, or to anyone who gets these invitations. The four checks take a few minutes. Send it to a colleague

Corrections: None this week. One promise to close: last week I said I would share your answers about refereeing. Nobody replied, and fair enough: typing a reply was too much to ask. This week's question takes a tap and a send. Spot an error? Reply and we will run the correction right here, loudly.

That's the week. Forward this to a labmate who would want the four checks, and if it reached you secondhand, subscribe here.

Erik Founder, Manusights