The Conceptual ‘APC Ring’: Is There a Risk of APC-Driven Guest Authorship, and Is a Change in the Culture of the APC Needed?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While guest or honourary authorship in academic papers is a broadly and widely discussed phenomenon in biomedical research, the issue of the use—or abuse—of article-processing charges (APCs) as a form of potential authorship exchange currency, that is, the ‘APC ring,’ is neither being considered nor discussed. The APC is central to the open-access (OA) movement, specifically the gold OA model. It is conceivable that, in a hyper-competitive academic publishing environment where the number of gold OA journals is growing, a segment of poorly funded researchers aiming to publish in ranked OA journals with out-of-reach APCs might turn to richer or well-funded researchers to cover the APC bill in exchange for authorship. Despite this, no published cases directly documenting APC-for-authorship schemes as a form of guest authorship appear to exist, which seems inconceivable. One possible explanation is that if such unethical behaviour were to be detected by APC-charging OA journals, it might not be reported as such. In this situation, APC-dependent OA journals would be conflicted between receiving a financial lifeline, the APC, and exposing authors that have abused the APC in their journals in exchange for authorship. How would publishers dependent on the APC-based OA model justify receiving APCs derived from an APC ring? Although this form of guest authorship is currently hypothetical, it seems highly likely, so this issue needs greater debate, and if actual case studies exist, these need to be openly and publicly debated to better appreciate how this phenomenon is taking place.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | MetaresearchResearch integrity Domain: Incentives · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Theoretical or conceptual | low |
| gpt | MetaresearchResearch integrityScholarly communication Domain: Methods · Genre: Methods About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Theoretical or conceptual | low |
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
The models disagree on parts of this classification; every voice is preserved in the section at the end of the page.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".