More than 300 at once: Publisher retracts entire conference proceedings

The leader of the scientific conference gave the tip.

The proceedings of a conference with the same name as the Association for Computing Machinery's conference were published in the same venue and with lots of overlap authors.

The International Conference on Information Management and Technology (ICIMTech) took place in Jakarta, Indonesia from August 19-20, according to the tip.

Scott Delman, the organization's director of publications, told us that they saw something that looked familiar because of an investigation that led to a mass retraction of conference proceedings.

In the earlier case, involving the (unintentionally) ironically named Information Hiding and Information Processing (IHIP) conference in 2018), Delman said that he had received an anonymous allegation that one of the papers had been generated by a computer.

Delman told Retraction Watch that the allegation was credible.

The conference co-chairs and program committee co-chairs claimed that they were not involved in the peer review of that paper or other papers submitted to the conference. The co-chairs said they were only responsible for getting a venue. More on that in a moment. They said that the peer review was handled by a Beijing-based company.

One of the conference organizers in Beijing was tracked down by the academy. The paper was peer-reviewed and after multiple requests, Gao sent a PDF of the alleged review, which appeared to have been faked.

Delman said that questions were raised about who was doing peer review for the conference. After an investigation that took months and months, it was found that none of the authors of the 26 papers presented at the conference responded.

Delman said that the conference co-chairs and program co-chairs would be punished for the problems with the peer review process.

When they got the tip about ICIMTech, they were ready. The association withdrew the proceedings of the ICIMTech conference after another investigation, and a company had organized all of the peer review. Evaristus Didik Madyatmadja, the general chair of the conferences, did not respond to our request for comment.

This time, it meant 323 papers, all of which now include the notice.

While investigating potential publication-related misconduct in connection with the ICIMTech 2021 Conference Proceedings, serious concerns were raised that cast doubt on the integrity of the peer-review process and all papers published in the Proceedings of this Conference. The integrity of the entire Conference has been called into question. As a result, of its investigation, ACM has decided to retract the Entire Conference Proceedings and all related papers from the ACM Digital Library.

None of the papers from this Proceeding should be cited in the literature because of the questionable integrity of the peer review process for this Conference.

The move was earned by Lonni Besan.