The Ghost Masthead: Why Your Editorial Board is a Hostage, Not a Gateway

Peer Review is Not Broken; It’s Being Bypassed

For years, the academic community has moaned about the "performance art" of peer review. We talk about reviewer fatigue and the lack of incentives as if they are the primary threats to science. They aren't. The real threat is far more sinister: the Ghost Masthead.

We are watching a systemic hijacking where mid-tier legacy journals are bought like distressed real estate. The goal isn't to push science forward. They serve as "integrity skins" for paper mills. When a publisher buys a journal and the Editor-in-Chief (the supposed gatekeeper) is never asked to review a single paper for six years, we aren't looking at a management failure. We are looking at a shell company wearing a scientist’s lab coat.

The "Zombie Journal" Strategy

This isn't just an isolated incident; it's a cold, calculated business model for predatory 2.0 players. The strategy is simple: find a reputable publisher in financial trouble, snatch up their indexed titles, and keep the old editorial board's names on the masthead without actually letting them touch a single manuscript. It is a brilliant, if disgusting, use of borrowed equity.

To the outside world, and more importantly to indexing services like Web of Science, the journal looks legitimate because it features established professors from Toulouse or Oxford. But behind the scenes, the "Managing Editor" is bypassing these experts entirely, funneling a torrent of low-quality submissions from high-pressure "publish-or-perish" regions directly to publication.

Look at the mess at Revue des Composites et des Matériaux Avancés (RCMA). As Retraction Watch noted in early 2026, twenty-three editors finally walked out. Why? Because they realized they were being used as human shields. Since the takeover, the volume didn't just grow. It mutated. The output more than doubled while the focus drifted thousands of miles away from the board’s actual expertise. It’s a classic bait and switch.

The Money of Displacement

Why do they do it? Because an Impact Factor is a license to print money. In the predatory economy, a journal indexed in Web of Science is worth up to half a million dollars on the open market. The ROI comes from the Article Processing Charges (APCs). By keeping the board as a "Ghost Masthead," the publisher avoids the pesky "rejections" that board members tend to issue. Rejections don't pay the bills; volume does.

Think of this as the Anthropology of the Scavenger. These publishers are the vultures of the world of research. They do not build prestige. They consume the prestige others spent decades building until the carcass is picked clean and the journal gets delisted. By the time the industry notices, they have moved to the next acquisition. It is an extraction play, pure and simple.

Time for the 'Nuclear Option' in Indexing

If we want to stop the scavenging of legacy journals, we need more than just mass resignations. We need a structural overhaul of how we define a "live" journal.

1. Mandatory "Verified Workflow" Audits

Indexing services need to stop treating editorial boards like static text on a page. We need a new protocol, perhaps backed by NISO, where editors have to check in via an independent system. This would prove they are actually looking at the papers published in their name. If a head editor hasn't logged into the system for six months, the journal gets flagged. It is a simple fix for a big deal problem.

2. The Penalty of Succession

When a journal changes hands, it should lose its Impact Factor and indexing status for a two-year "probationary period." If the new publisher is legitimate, they will earn it back. If they are a scavenger, the incentive to buy the journal vanishes because the "integrity skin" is removed at the point of sale.

We cannot let the reputations of scholars be used to trick researchers. The era of the silent takeover has to end. It is vital we act now before the remaining credible titles are hollowed out from the inside. Science depends on it.