Computer and information sciences

We are nearing the completion of an investigation into an alleged fraudulent special issue of one of our journals. Someone impersonated legitimate Special Issue editors and invited papers from legitimate authors in the community. We discovered this alleged fraud while reaching out to the people who were listed as the Special Issue editors only to find out from them that they had nothing to do with it.

An article that has been published in our journal has subsequently been found to have serious ethical issues. The authors did not seek the correct ethics approval from their institution before conducting the research (which involves human subjects). They also did not obtain informed consent from the research participants prior to publication.