China will impose heavier punishments on people involved in scientific paper scandals, said Han Qide, chairman of the China Association for Science and Technology.
"Retraction of scientific papers by international publishers has done great harm to China's academic development and its reputation," said Han at a Wednesday meeting on improving scientific and academic institutions.
This March, BioMed Central from the United Kingdom retracted 43 scientific papers of which 41 were from the Chinese mainland, because of fake peer-reviews provided by a third-party agents.
In another recent case, the Springer-Verlag Publishing House announced retraction of 64 papers published in its 10 academic journals. All of them were by Chinese authors.
Investigation shows that most of the authors submitted their papers via a third-party agent which not only provided language services and submissions but services beyond basic academic ethics including trading papers, said Han.
