Dear Editorial Office,

Dear Dr. Jones,

My name is Editorial Office, and I am writing on behalf of the selected journal. I came across your article, "A Conceptual Mapping Exercise of Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards in Residential & Community Care Using Hodges' Model and Threshold Concepts". Its focus on deprivation of liberty safeguards, Hodges' model, older adults caught our attention. I would like to invite you to consider a new and unpublished contribution to the selected journal.

For this invited contribution, we are pleased to offer a Full APC Waiver. Invited manuscripts receive priority editorial handling, and we aim to provide an initial editorial decision within one week. This invitation does not imply acceptance, and editorial standards remain unchanged.

If you are interested, a working title or short abstract is enough for an initial discussion. If your current work is not closely aligned with this journal, you are also welcome to share your present research topic and we can check whether another journal in our portfolio may be more suitable.

I would be glad to answer any questions and look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,
Editorial Office
the selected journal

Dear Editorial Office,

Re. 'the selected journal: Invited Contribution – Full APC Waiver'

Thank you for your communication and recognition of my recent paper.

Unfortunately you have not specified the 'selected journal'. Without this detail it is difficult to proceed at all, or ascertain what benefit is provided by the 'full APC waiver'. 

I am more troubled, however by your name. Is it really 'Editorial Office'?

Again the specific journal matters here. If it is materials science, chemistry, or quantum physics or related this is (slightly?) less of a problem. Otherwise, I do worry that with Hodges' model being person-centred your being de-personalised does not sit very well with the purposes and values of Hodges' model.

It is however reassuring to learn that I should not take your invitation to suggest acceptance, and that accordingly your editorial standards remain intact - especially in these times.

Again, even if I were interested, I am at a loss to provide either a working title, or abstract.

I do hope you understand my difficulty? 

Although perhaps I ask too much.

Can it be - this IS in fact the journal?

'The Selected Journal'?

Yours Faithfully,

Mr^ P Jones

^'Conceptual Surgeon' 4th class

(and not sent.) 

Richardson et al. 'The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly'

Abstract

'Science is characterized by collaboration and cooperation, but also by uncertainty, competition, and inequality. While there has always been some concern that these pressures may compel some to defect from the scientific research ethos—i.e., fail to make genuine contributions to the production of knowledge or to the training of an expert workforce—the focus has largely been on the actions of lone individuals. Recently, however, reports of coordinated scientific fraud activities have increased. Some suggest that the ease of communication provided by the internet and open-access publishing have created the conditions for the emergence of entities—paper mills (i.e., sellers of mass-produced low quality and fabricated research), brokers (i.e., conduits between producers and publishers of fraudulent research), predatory journals, who do not conduct any quality controls on submissions—that facilitate systematic scientific fraud. Here, we demonstrate through case studies that i) individuals have cooperated to publish papers that were eventually retracted in a number of journals, ii) brokers have enabled publication in targeted journals at scale, and iii), within a field of science, not all subfields are equally targeted for scientific fraud. Our results reveal some of the strategies that enable the entities promoting scientific fraud to evade interventions. Our final analysis suggests that this ability to evade interventions is enabling the number of fraudulent publications to grow at a rate far outpacing that of legitimate science.'

R.A.K. Richardson, S.S. Hong, J.A. Byrne, T. Stoeger, & L.A.N. Amaral, The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (32) e2420092122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2420092122 (2025).
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2420092122

My source: The Economist, 9th August 2025. 

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/08/06/fraudulent-scientific-papers-are-booming