In September 2025, Laertis Ikonomou, an associate professor of oral biology at the University at Buffalo, discovered he was listed as an author on a commentary he had never written, submitted, or seen, published in the Journal of Carcinogenesis & Mutagenesis. When he asked the journal to remove the article, the publisher, Walsh Medical Media, did not treat the report as a straightforward case of identity theft. Instead, according to reporting by Retraction Watch, the journal told him he would have to pay to have his own falsified authorship removed.
What happened, in sequence
Per Retraction Watch’s account and the correspondence it reviewed, the timeline ran as follows:
- September 23, 2025 — Ikonomou contacted the journal after finding the commentary carrying his name and requested its removal.
- October 6, 2025 — A representative identified as “Dwayne Harrison” replied that the article could not be removed without a publication fee, initially quoting 400 euros: “without the publication fee we can’t remove the article. So kindly make a payment of 400 Euros.”
- November 10, 2025 — After further back-and-forth, the demand rose to 499 euros, with the representative writing, in part, “Atleast try to make 499 Euros will remove the article from the website.”
Ikonomou did not pay. Rather than retract the article or acknowledge the impersonation, the journal instead swapped the byline to a different name — “Teresa Partmans,” credited to the Hospital del Mar Research Institute in Barcelona — a person Retraction Watch was unable to independently verify as real. The underlying article, never written or authorized by anyone with a legitimate claim to it, remained live.
Not an isolated incident
Retraction Watch’s reporting on the Ikonomou case followed an earlier report involving a different Walsh Medical Media journal, in which another author was refused a retraction of a paper he had not written or submitted unless he first paid a fee — the same pay-to-retract pattern, applied to a different impersonated researcher. Read together, the two reports describe a repeatable business practice rather than a single rogue editor’s decision: an author is placed on a paper against their knowledge or consent, and removing the false attribution is then made conditional on payment.
This distinguishes the case from more familiar categories of publisher misconduct that CASRAI has covered elsewhere, such as paper mills selling fabricated authorship slots to willing buyers or peer-review manipulation inside a legitimate journal’s workflow. Here, the researcher targeted did not want the credit, did not solicit it, and was nonetheless asked to pay to have it removed.
Walsh Medical Media’s publishing footprint and the OMICS connection
The Journal of Carcinogenesis & Mutagenesis is one of dozens of journals published under the Walsh Medical Media name, spanning specialties well outside conventional healthcare publishing — from chemical engineering to coastal zone management to intellectual property. Retraction Watch’s reporting cites analysis by Graham Kendall outlining apparent structural and operational links between Walsh Medical Media and OMICS International, the publisher a U.S. federal court ordered to pay more than $50.1 million to the Federal Trade Commission in April 2019. That judgment, issued by the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada, resolved FTC claims that OMICS and its founder, Srinubabu Gedela, misled authors and conference attendees about peer-review rigor, editorial-board composition, journal indexing and impact factors, and hidden article-processing fees — conduct the court described as “sustained and continuous” over years, not an isolated incident. (Source: FTC press release, April 2019.)
The alleged lineage matters for research administrators evaluating a journal’s legitimacy: a publisher’s current branding, journal count, or website polish is not evidence of a clean operating history, and apparent successor or affiliate entities of publishers previously sanctioned for deceptive practices warrant the same scrutiny as the original.
Why this matters for research integrity and CRediT practice
Cases like this sit at the intersection of authorship integrity and publisher accountability — two areas CASRAI’s CRediT taxonomy work and broader research-integrity content address directly:
- Unauthorized authorship is a form of identity misuse, not a contribution dispute. Standard authorship dispute resolution processes assume all named parties had some role in producing the work and disagree about credit or order. Fabricated authorship, where a real person’s name is attached without their knowledge, is a different problem: it is closer to identity theft than to a contribution disagreement, and institutional and publisher response mechanisms built for the former are often poorly suited to the latter.
- A pay-to-retract demand inverts the normal incentive structure of retraction. Retraction exists to correct the scholarly record when something is wrong with it. NISO’s CREC recommended practice and COPE’s retraction guidelines both treat retraction as a correction obligation owed to the record and to readers, not a service a publisher is entitled to charge the misattributed party for. A publisher that conditions removal of a fabricated byline on payment from the victim, rather than removing it as a matter of basic accuracy, is not operating a retraction process in any recognizable sense.
- Quietly swapping the byline is arguably worse than doing nothing. Replacing one unverified name with another, unverifiable one does not resolve the underlying problem — a paper with no traceable, accountable author remains indexed and citable. It also removes the original victim’s ability to point to a public correction confirming they were never the author, since the article, and any residual metadata or cached record of the earlier byline, may still exist elsewhere.
What researchers can do if this happens to them
Retraction Watch’s reporting and CASRAI’s own guidance on related scenarios point to a consistent set of steps for a researcher who discovers unauthorized authorship:
- Document the discovery immediately — screenshots of the live article, the byline, and any correspondence with the publisher, since journals in this category have been shown to alter articles without notice.
- Do not pay. A legitimate publisher does not charge a misattributed author to correct a false byline; paying establishes no faster or more durable remedy and normalizes the practice.
- Report the journal to Retraction Watch and check whether it or its publisher already appears in the Retraction Watch Database or on watchlists such as Cabells’ Predatory Reports.
- Notify your institution’s research integrity office and, where relevant, your funder — unauthorized authorship on a public commentary or paper can surface later in tenure, grant, or CV review if it is not formally disclaimed on the record.
- Where the journal claims institutional affiliation for a fabricated co-author (as happened here, with an unverifiable Hospital del Mar Research Institute credit), consider notifying that institution directly, since its name is also being used without apparent authorization.
