Laertis Ikonomou, an associate professor at the University of Buffalo in New York, discovered September 2025 he was listed as an author on a commentary he had never seen before that had been published in the Journal of Carcinogenesis & Mutagenesis. He immediately requested the journal remove the article, and the journal demanded a fee to do so. When Ikonomou requested clarity on the fee, a representative from the publisher named Dwayne Harrison responded: “without the publication fee we can’t remove the article. So kindly make a payment of 400 Euros and clear it. Otherwie [sic] let me know, how much you will be ready to pay,” Harrison wrote. But after a few exchanges, the journal just changed the author on the paper to a different name.

The Journal of Carcinogenesis & Mutagenesis lists an impact factor of 3.02, despite not being indexed by Clarivate’s Web of Science. Journal lists a CiteScore, a citation metric developed by Elsevier, on its website, despite not being indexed by Scopus. The journal is listed in Cabells’ Predatory Reports for violations of its criteria on integrity and peer review, among others.

Source https://retractionwatch.com/2026/03/05/publisher-demands-500-from-impersonated-author-to-retract-paper/

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