The Hindawi Files. Part 3: Wiley

And how they're bad at this.

Sorry this has taken a while. I’m not always in my right mind. These posts come between work, sleep, and recently, being ill. Long story.

Also: I had a feeling something was going to happen… and then it did! You’ll see.

In Parts 1 and 2, we dealt with the timeline and the nature of the massive retraction debacle in and around Wiley’s acquisition of Hindawi publishing. This will be a little different, as we’ll look into the operational environment of the company itself.

As Wiley is a publicly traded company, there is a perversity here: while the academic processes at journals are often veiled or opaque, and we often moan about how difficult it is to know what’s going on, the financial details of this case are publicly and persistently available. The SEC demands it.

So this might be a little different to what you’re used to reading from me. But we’ll get there.

And remember…

Always.

Follow.

The.

Money.

Let’s start with a funny quote. I just have to get this out of the way quickly before we get to the meaty bits: this is from an April 2023 post from the EVP of Research at Wiley.

In September 2022, Wiley identified and immediately alerted the industry to paper mill activity we found operating at scale. Specifically, we found fraudulent outside editors that had subverted our processes and workflows, leading to a proliferation of bad content. This scheme hit Hindawi’s Special Issues program hard.

That encapsulates everything in Part 1 and Part 2. Listing this with active verbs (‘identified’, ‘alerted’) … funny. I would have taken ‘we were passive and incompetent until circumstances dictated we couldn’t be passive and incompetent any more’.

But I don’t want this section to be ‘finding things people from Wiley said in the public domain and poking fun at them’. We have to go in quite a different direction, straight into the sausage factory.

1. Wiley never listed any material threats from paper mill activities in their SEC filings, even though (a) research integrity threats could clearly be expected to compromise the viability of their core business, and (b) they did compromise their core business.

2. Shareholder activist law firms managed to screw $3.7 million out of Wiley for the loss in stock price after the Hindawi acquisition. This is more than it would cost to run a functioning research integrity program.

3. The Wiley masthead itself contains at least one journal which is publishing dangerous medical misinformation, and is likely fake. A completely compromised journal is strong evidence of poor governance.

4. A completely subservient academic and publishing press has never pushed Wiley hard on the details of the purchase of Hindawi. Not once.

Isn’t that fun?

Wiley never listed any material threats from paper mill activities in their SEC filings, even though (a) research integrity threats could clearly be expected to compromise the viability of their core business, and (b) they did compromise their core business.

For those of you who do not invest in public companies in America, meet the 10-K form.

A Form 10-K is an annual report required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), that gives a comprehensive summary of a company's financial performance. Although similarly named, the annual report on Form 10-K is distinct from the often glossy "annual report to shareholders," which a company must send to its shareholders when it holds an annual meeting to elect directors (though some companies combine the annual report and the 10-K into one document). The 10-K includes information such as company history, organizational structure, executive compensation, equity, subsidiaries, and audited financial statements, among other information.

Wikipedia

Unlike many academic issues, where publishers will ignore manifest tomfoolery for months or years at a time — allowing whole journals to go tits-up, allowing peer review to get compromised, allowing mass fakery to infest their products, etc. — the 10-K form is a different ball of wax. The SEC is significantly more serious and powerful than an angry assistant professor sending impotent emails. Thus, financial disclosures are treated more seriously.

As a consequence, while companies can still play little games with various pieces of information on the 10-K form, the whole exercise is infused with a different level of heat and complexity. They also require auditing! Someone not too spiritually dissimilar to me has to analyze and approve them.

So: it was very interesting to me to read the Wiley 10-K forms for the entire period of this sorry saga, because at no point do they mention paper mills deliberately trying to defraud them and ruin their business model. Before, during, and after.

There is a section specifically for this: Part 1, Section 1A.

Wiley lists a lot of regular milquetoast shit, such as:

The demand for digital and lower cost books could impact our sales volumes and pricing in an adverse way.

A common trend facing each of our businesses is the digitization of content and proliferation of distribution channels through the internet and other electronic means, which are replacing traditional print formats. This trend towards digital content has also created contraction in the print book retail market which increases the risk of bankruptcy for certain retail customers, potentially leading to the disruption of short-term product supply to consumers, as well as potential bad debt writeoffs. New distribution channels, such as digital formats, the internet, online retailers, and growing delivery platforms (e.g., tablets and e-readers), combined with the concentration of retailer power, present both risks and opportunities to our traditional publishing models, potentially impacting both sales volumes and pricing.

April, 2021. 10-K form.

But at no point do they mention paper mills — an entire class of business as setting out to catastrophically destroy trust in their brand. There are a whole slew of consequences which are all very real and material:

• loss of academic reputation, hence lower submissions

• delisting of journals, hence lower reputation

• cost of clean-up if fully breached

• etc.

It’s hard to determine if other publishers typically do, because a lot of them aren’t American companies. However, recently Springer Nature went through their long-awaited IPO (that is, they are a private company and decided to become a public company). Disclosure requirements during the IPO process are similar to the 10-K requirements — you have to list threats.

And while I am not legally allowed to download and view the documents (it’s a German stock exchange thing), happily they were reported elsewhere, and Springer-Nature (1) explicitly listed what happened to Wiley (mass retractions, loss of reputation) as a material threat, and (2) explicitly noted that if journals are excluded from Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports database, “this could have a material detrimental effect on the results of our operations.” 

I don’t know how asleep you have to be, and at what wheel, when other companies list you as a cautionary tale, but you still can’t bring yourself to formally report what happened to you yourself.

(Even now, here’s the 2024 filing that doesn’t say, for instance, ‘a whole category of other business exists which has the stated intent of ruining our business’).

Shareholder activist law firms managed to screw $3.7 million out of Wiley for the loss in stock price after the Hindawi acquisition. This is more than it would cost to run a functioning research integrity program.

Buried within the June 2023 10-K form, there is this curious detail:

For the academics in the room - we’ve already met the 10-K (‘an audited overview company's business and financials’), now a little detail (GAAP: ‘Generally Accepted Accounting Principles’) — which is an assurance that the lines on this particular table are calculated according to collectively understood metrics.

In other words, ‘Legal settlement’ is exactly what it sounds like, and the footnote description is ‘a litigation matter related to consideration for a previous acquisition’.

The shorthand is: their own shareholders sued them. They said they were going to, and did.

This is not uncommon, shareholders do it a lot, and they are generally entitled to, and sometimes they have a point. There are a few reasons to sue a company you own shares in, such as:

(a) withholding information

(b) withholding rights

(c) making extra-stupid business decisions (or more formally ‘failure in duty-of-care’)

Any large public company in business for long enough has seen a suit or two like this. They receive it, review it, and make a decision: do they fight it or do they settle it?

Generally, they settle. The reasons are many: lawyers are expensive (even if they work for you, lawyers multiply like rabbits), the whole thing is a distraction, and the discovery process, where the plaintiffs get to go through your books and collect more evidence, is something they might prefer to avoid.

And I imagine if you are making a case about this whole Hindawi nonsense being mishandled… there may be a whole lot of details we’ll never see.

Beyond that, we don’t get to know much. The plaintiffs won’t (or can’t) talk about the settlement and the company certainly won’t.

What we do know is: this is noticeably more expensive than running a full-scale proactive research integrity program. For 3.7M, you could have the world. I am quite confident in saying: I could run that as the operating budget of a fraud mitigation unit for multiple years, and drop the amount of nonsense by … maybe two-thirds, three-quarters? within that time.

The Wiley masthead itself (as in, not the Hindawi transferred journals) contains at least one journal which is publishing dangerous medical misinformation, and is likely completely fake.

Now.

This one, I can’t tell you a damned thing that’s meaningful.

Not a word. And there are very, very good reasons for this.

But read the above again. It’s as bad as it sounds.

Is it a ‘Hindawi-level problem’? No. By normative publication standards, it is only a massive failure of oversight rather than a galactic one.

The one thing I can say for context: problems at this journal started before the Hindawi saga, continued through it, and are currently occurring.

I think this is indicative that Hindawi was not a ‘wake-up call’.

Rather, we can find exactly the same problem - detectable widespread academic fraud, of a very similar kind to the versions they detected and (partially) removed within the Hindawi masthead - within Wiley’s own allegedly-respectable masthead, not merely in some nonsense journal they bought off Hindawi that only exists to run special issue scams.

Any normal business facilitating large-scale fraud through what is now a subsidiary would man the barricades in any similar situation: audit everything, attempt to better understand the problem, and act. See above — long term, I’m absolutely certain that it’s cheaper than another 3.7M down the line!

But publishing is not a normal business, it is an exceptionally lazy one.

And we know they haven’t done this audit, because (a) a competent audit would definitely, definitely find it and (b) this rotten journal is still active, still publishing. And it’s been well over a year since this dam broke.

Part of that is because…

A completely subservient academic and publishing press has never pushed Wiley hard on the details of the purchase of Hindawi.

As you can probably imagine, I have read a lot about this unfortunate incident now. What strikes me is just how compliant the reporting is on this issue.

Not once.

There are clues about this generalized gormlessness everywhere. On the day of writing this section, there was a piece in Retraction Watch about ‘The PubPeer Conundrum’ which contains this astonishing line.

we find that many members of the data integrity community may be unaware of the genesis of PubPeer, and this lack of knowledge can lead to wild theories about who began and who operates PubPeer.

OK. Give me a second to breathe it out here.

(1) PubPeer is twelve years old

(2) PubPeer publishes research integrity concerns

(3) PubPeer has a Wikipedia page

(4) PubPeer is supported by a 501c3 (carefully hidden in plain sight under the obscure name of The PubPeer Foundation, and that means you can just Google their entire membership and financial information)

(5) PubPeer has, probably, more than 100,000 comments, lots of media coverage, many papers, and was the genesis for some of the largest research integrity stories of the last decade

(6) YOU ARE MEMBERS OF THE DATA INTEGRITY COMMUNITY

I cannot fully outline how much of a self-own this is. If members of the data integrity community may be unaware of the genesis of PubPeer, this is like a programmer not having heard of StackExchange, or a New York trader not being aware that London has a stock exchange, or a runner being surprised by … having feet.

It is exactly this sort of fecklessness that infuses the general writing about the Hindawi Incident in the publishing press.

I have long held the view that many members of the the affiliated members of the ‘publishing community’, the people who talk and write and consult about this kind of issue, are frequently arrogant, often clueless, usually slow, always hidebound, typically patronizing, and borderline useless. It’s a happy little club full of smug drones.

(Note: they aren’t ALL like this, and I know several members of this community personally — most of whom are let’s say ‘very diplomatic’ when I air what might be considered more offensive opinions about why many of their colleagues plumb the depths of uselessness.)

But one thing that maintains this uselessness is a journalistic and business environment that is exceptionally gentle.

This is the point, actually, where I don’t have any citations.

• Were there any hard-hitting investigative pieces on the biggest screwup in academic publishing history?

• Any anonymous interviews with Wiley insiders?

• Who was responsible? Who was holding the hot potato when it burned everyone?

• And subsequent to that: who was fired? Who ‘quietly left’ the company to ‘pursue other opportunities’?

• What was it like in the room when the penny dropped that they would have to make thousands and thousands of retractions?

• Did anyone that didn’t get pink slipped and/or fired into the sun for enabling this utter failure of governance stick around? What do they do now?

I’d love to cite any of the above. But I can’t, because they don’t exist.

And I can’t investigate this myself — my name doesn’t survive even the most cursory of interactions with the Google machine (also why I stopped writing to dodgy authors years ago), I absolutely do not have the skills of a journalist, and I already have a job. During writing this saga, sometimes two.

But apparently: no-one else can investigate it either.

Don’t get me wrong: there absolutely IS adversarial journalism in academia/research/ science/etc. Science Magazine, Undark, Vox, etc. have all published great pieces on this. And Retraction Watch is always publishing in this space.

But I’m not talking about those outlets or the journalists involved. I’m talking about the compliant and gummy-smiling ‘publishing press’ who just saw the biggest failure of publishing in human history, the people who understand publishing as a business on a granular level, and didn’t think the biggest fuckup in human history was worthy of investigation.

Please tell me if I’ve missed some hard-hitting journalism somewhere, where someone actually went to the mattresses and reported the mechanics of what went wrong.

Next time, in Part 4: I get mad. Real, real mad. I’ve kept the snark bottled up fairly well for this series, but it’s time to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of I Can’t Even With You People.

UPDATES:

• Kent Anderson writes to say he’s been covering Wiley for years on The Geyser. And he certainly has, more congruent to the original Scholarly Kitchen mandate (that place used to have more teeth) than the present version. I just haven’t read it, because the good stuff is subscriber-only.

• I have said heads didn’t roll above — this discounts, of course, that the CEO resigned. Is that connected? Probably. Can I confirm or deny anything to do with that transition? I cannot. And, I reiterate, people who are better placed than me to make that determination never gave that a proper shake either.

• At least two people (so far!) have pointed out that 3.7M is already smaller than the Wiley research integrity budget. Yes, absolutely. What I mean is: you have to give the money to ME. Obviously. Not stick it straight into a machine that creates meetings about other meetings.