Inside Aletheia: the Cypriot firm selling ghost-authored papers to a materials journal
A document obtained from an anonymous informant styled only as "Reviewer2" appears to tie Aletheia Scholarly Services Ltd., a company registered in Nicosia, Cyprus, to an indexed materials-science journal through a structured manuscript-for-fee contract. The contract, reviewed by SciHonest, specifies quarterly quotas of pre-formatted submissions and payment in stablecoins or ETH upon acceptance.
Aletheia has for years advertised "editorial preparation services" in ways that are ambiguously legal in most European jurisdictions. The leaked document removes that ambiguity: the arrangement is not editing, it is ghost-authorship sold by the unit, with peer review coordinated by the buying journal.
The tipster, who uses the handle Reviewer2 on encrypted channels, declined to identify the journal directly in their initial message, writing only that it is indexed and uses the initialism "JAMR" internally. They provided the scanned contract (reproduced below, redacted), signed on the journal side by an individual identified only as "Silviu P., Editor-in-Chief". We have not yet verified this signature.
What the contract says
- Forty submission packages per quarter, minimum.
- USD 1,450 per accepted manuscript, payable in ETH or USDC.
- Average time-to-decision capped at twenty-one days.
- All communications via PGP or Signal only.
- Mutual termination for any public mention of the arrangement.
Document, as supplied
A copy of the contract, as supplied by the tipster, was pinned to a public IPFS gateway to ensure it cannot be removed if the journal or Aletheia succeed in compelling takedowns elsewhere. We reproduce the cover page here in low resolution; a full copy is available via the link Reviewer2 provided.
Figure 1 below shows the upper half of page one. The signature block and internal references have been blurred at the tipster's request pending our own verification.
[ figure: redacted cover page of the Aletheia-JAMR contract ]
What we asked the journal
We contacted the Editor-in-Chief named in the contract through the journal's listed editorial inbox on 2024-11-20 and again on 2024-11-25. Neither message received a reply. We then emailed the managing editor at the publisher's corporate address, with the same result.
Next steps
SciHonest is verifying the contract independently before publishing the journal's name. If you have information
about either Aletheia Scholarly Services or about ghost-authored submissions funneled through named materials-science
journals, we want to hear from you. Tips: tips@scihonest.xyz.
Acknowledgment: the original tip was brought to our attention by Reviewer2, whom we have not been able to identify beyond a PGP key posted to the public SKS network. Our own verification of that key is ongoing.