Excerpt: What do Henry Kissinger and Martin Scorsese have in common? Fun fact: Both evidently review scientific manuscripts for money.

OK, maybe that’s not quite true. In fact, it’s not at all true. But headshots of both men appear in the bios of two purported reviewers (one of which has a woman’s name, sorry, Martin!) for a company called EditPub that sells various scientific services, including peer reviews.

The EditPub site (which seemed on Thursday to be no longer up and running), is almost entirely in Chinese, but its homepage bills it as a “service center for scientific research.” Its existence came to light earlier this month after the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology retracted a 2015 article by a group from Dalian University in China. According to the journal, EditPub had “compromised” the peer review process in a way that the journal has so far refused to make public.

Click here to read the full article

Click here to read the Retraction Watch story about the recent retraction

 Our thanks to Dalmeet Singh Chawla for alerting us about this article