A shady business operated out of a British mansion is buying up scientific journals to earn millions by publishing mediocre studies

A shady business network apparently run by Pakistani and Indonesian citizens from a mansion on the outskirts of Birmingham, United Kingdom, has launched an attack on the Spanish scientific journal industry. The group is buying up long-standing publications and converting them into fast-money machines by increasing the price they charge researchers for publishing, in addition to increasing the number of studies published with little regard to their quality. Alberto Martín and Emilio Delgado, two University of Granada professors who have been investigating the phenomenon, compare what is happening to the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which people are secretly replaced by emotionless clones born from mysterious alien pods.

The two Spanish experts say the epicenter for this takeover is 62 St. Bernards Road, an imposing 1879 mansion located in Solihull, in southeast Birmingham. The house serves as the headquarters of Oxbridge Publishing House, a business that plays with the names of the prestigious universities of Oxford and Cambridge, but in reality, has nothing to do with either. Muhammad Haseeb, a 38-year-old Pakistani citizen, is registered with the British Companies House as the company’s owner. Since 2020, his business has acquired 36 scholarly journals, according to research by Martín and Delgado. Among them are five U.S. titles, including the American Journal of Health Behavior, Tobacco Regulatory Science and Journal of Commercial Biotechnology, as well as seven journals in Spain. The latter, which include Cuadernos de Economía, Comunicar and Profesional de la Información, once a showcase for Spanish research, have suddenly begun to publish large numbers of studies by Asian scientists, particularly from China, Malaysia, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia.

Many see Oxbridge Publishing House as taking advantage of the “publish or perish” system that dominates global science and can be suffocating for many professionals. Researchers’ promotions and salary increases often depend on the number of studies they publish in journals that are registered in international databases. At the same time, a shift to open-access science has meant that readers no longer pay to read journals, leaving the authors themselves to foot the bill, or rather, pay hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to publish their studies. This provides a perverse incentive for publishers to publish more and more studies in an indiscriminate manner in order to earn more money, and for researchers to submit pointless work with the sole purpose of padding their resumes.

The recently published analysis of Oxbridge Publishing House’s practices is highly revealing. The journal Revista de Psicología del Deporte, previously linked to Spain’s University of the Balearic Islands, has gone from charging $312 per study to $6,240. Before, 74% of its studies were of Spanish origin, but that percentage has now plummeted to 13%. Chinese authors currently monopolize the publication’s bylines. Fonseca, Journal of Communication, which was previously linked to the Spanish University of Salamanca, did not charge for publication, but now asks its authors for around $2,600 for each study. The same phenomenon can be seen at the educational magazine Artseduca, once published by the Jaume I University in Castellón de la Plana, Spain. The Oxbridge conglomerate has published some 1,500 studies in its Spanish journals, according to the study by Martín and Delgado that was published on Wednesday, with an income that is allegedly in the millions. The researchers denounce that respected magazines are being acquired to “turn them into farms that charge article-processing fees.”

Bibliometrics expert Félix de Moya of the Spanish National Research Council, explains in a telephone interview with EL PAÍS that he was the owner of the journal Profesional de la Información (Information Professional), a benchmark in the field of documentation and libraries. He says he received an offer of around one million euros by email, and sold the publication at the end of 2023 to a company named OAText, though the title was registered as belonging to Oxbridge on January 1, 2024. As a condition of the sale, Moya stipulated that its founder, 80-year-old engineer Tomàs Baiget, would stay on as editor. (In 2023, Baiget publicly apologized for creating the website ArtiCulitos.com, on which he uploaded photographs of women’s butts, some of them taken without their consent.)

Profesional de la Información asked for roughly $1,300 for each published study and is now requesting double that amount, according to Martín and Delgado’s research. It has published less than a hundred studies during its new era: 44 from Spain, 31 from China, six from Saudi Arabia and four from Malaysia, among others. Tomàs Baiget takes issue with the Granada professors’ conclusions, saying, “They are a bit scandalous and sensationalist, and I feel poorly that they are spreading unfounded doubts about Profesional de la Información. Magazines get paid for their work like everyone else. Newspapers, for example, also charge, and no one is scandalized by that,” he argues. But newspapers pay the people who write for them — they don’t charge them. The engineer claims that he does not know Muhammad Haseeb and does not know if he is the owner. “In truth, no idea. I did see Muhammad’s name somewhere, but I don’t have the slightest idea what his position is,” he explains. “I vouch for the quality, ethics and good work, at least in my purview, which is Europe and the Americas.”

Muhammad Haseeb obtained a doctorate in economics from the Northern University of Malaysia, according to one of his public profiles, and is a visiting professor at the University of Economics and Human Sciences in Warsaw, according to the Oxbridge website. The business is not the sole occupant of the mansion on the outskirts of Birmingham. The 19th-century building serves as the headquarters for three other publishers: H&N Publishers UK, which is co-directed by Haseeb and 50-year-old Nira Hariyatie Hartani, who is from Indonesia; PNG Publications and Scientific Research, which is led by 33-year-old Hafiz Muhammad Azeem and 29-year-old Muhammad Talha, who are both from Pakistan; and Thinkbiotech, which is run by Talha.

A year ago, three other Spanish experts raised the alarm about this phenomenon, suggesting that it is driven by factories of mediocre studies that are presented ready-to-publish. “The numerous behind-the-scenes moves by international intermediaries to tempt Spanish journals suggest that we are only in a preliminary phase of a movement that could end up denaturing and perverting academic journals in our country,” warned Ángel María Delgado Vázquez from the Pablo de Olavide University, Rafael Repiso from the University of Málaga, and Álvaro Cabezas Clavijo from the International University of La Rioja.

The three specialists analyzed, among others, the case of Cuadernos de Economía (Economics Notebooks), which had been historically overseen by the economist Joan Hortalá, University of Barcelona professor emeritus and former president of the Barcelona stock exchange. The publication, which was sold to Oxbridge, began to charge around $2,600 per study and soon filled up with studies from Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia. The publication’s website falsely claims that it continues to be directed by Hortalá and published by the Autonomous University of Madrid and CUNEF, a private university in the same city. The three experts posited a pair of questions: “Are institutions (typically, public universities) doing anything to prevent the magazines they sponsored, financed or supported from ending up in the hands of dubious foreign business groups? Are our universities benefiting from the hundreds of thousands of petro-dollars that foreign investors are pouring into Spanish magazines?”

Since 2023, the geographer Pilar Paneque has run the Spanish entity that determines promotions and salary raises for university professors, the National Agency for Evaluation of Quality and Accreditation. In 2017 the organization established a requirement of more than a hundred published studies for professors to become department heads in some fields, something that Paneque herself has called “madness” and is trying to change.

The pressure to publish has given rise to very questionable editorial practices

Pilar Paneque, director of the Spanish National Agency for Evaluation of Quality and Accreditation

“It is well-known that the pressure to publish has given rise to very questionable editorial practices,” says the geographer, who laments the fact that some of the publications in question continue to be marked as valid by the most important international databases such as the Web of Science, which is operated by the London company Clarivate, and Scopus, a similar project run by Dutch publisher Elsevier. “It’s important to insist that the evaluation of our work be centered on the quality and innovative nature of the studies we carry out and not on the mere indexing of the journal in which we publish it. When that is not the case, the production and evaluation of the study is not guided by the principles and agreements of the scientific community itself, but rather, by large publishing companies like Clarivate and Elsevier, which by logic operate based on interests that, though legitimate, are quite different to those that pertain to the advancement of knowledge and common good,” says Paneque.

Spain’s primary scientific organization, the Spanish National Research Council, along with another 50 groups, signed a declaration against the Web of Science and Scopus in April, claiming that there is a lack of transparency as to the information they provide on the value of academic journals to which millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money are funneled. Currently, when researchers publish more studies in journals that are well-regarded by these private databases, they earn more money. Paneque sees the Martín and Delgado study as having lent more urgency to this concern. “Studies like this one provide more arguments for advancing the reform of research evaluation that is being promoted internationally and as to which the National Agency for Evaluation of Quality and Accreditation is taking very decisive steps,” she says.

Databases have taken some action on the issue, largely during the last year. The Web of Science had put its seal of quality on 17 of the 36 journals that have been bought by the Oxbridge network, but has now removed 11 of those, according to Martín and Delgado’s research. Scopus had previously approved all 36, but no longer backs eight of them. The rest of the Oxbridge publications carry on, publishing more and more Asian studies in exchange for more money, à la Invasion of the Body Snatchers, to use the Granada professors’ metaphor. Martín and Delgado call them “pod journals.” EL PAÍS tried to contact the residents of the English mansion on Thursday through a message sent to two emails regularly used by Haseeb and Hartani, but has yet to receive a response.

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