An engineering journal has retracted two papers after a company complained the authors of the articles used its software without a valid license. Both retracted papers were published by Ain Shams Engineering Journal in the last couple of years by different authors based in Egypt. 

Tom Jensen, vice president of Flow Science, told the firm offered the authors of both studies to legalize their version of the software by purchasing a license. But the company didn’t receive a response despite informing the researchers a retraction would be sought from the journal without a valid license.

This case is not the first time journals have been forced to pull articles for unlicensed uses of copyrighted work. In 2017, a scientist came under spotlight after asking for tens of thousands of dollars from researchers using his copyrighted questionnaire for research purposes, resulting in at least two teams withdrawing their papers instead of paying up.