Are Mandatory Institutional Emails for Manuscript Submission an Unfair and Discriminatory Policy?

With increasing cases of fraud in submission, peer review, and publication processes, some
by authors with fake identities and who use concocted emails, including the use of web-based
emails, editors and publishers are looking for ways to try and stem the tide of fraud. In some
journals, editors and publishers mistakenly believe that this might be possible by implementing
a policy that mandates submitting authors to have an institutional email. However, this
may be discriminatory at various levels, the most obvious of which is unfairness, i.e., no right
to “entry” to a journal based exclusively on the type of email used, even more so when the
submitting author is not fake. Such policies might, very ironically, even violate stated journal
or publisher policies on discrimination and inclusivity. Editors and publishers that employ such
tactics, as a way to attempt to reduce fraudulent submissions, need to rethink this potentially
discriminatory strategy. In a publishing world that is becoming increasingly litigious, it would
not be surprising if legal action would one day be taken against a journal or publisher by a
valid author using a web-based email such as @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, or @163.com, but
who may have been unfairly barred entry to that journal based on such a policy. Two real case
examples are provided, Tumor Biology, a struggling journal published by IOS Press, and Journal
of Business Ethics, a journal published by Springer Nature.
Keywords: accountability, corresponding author, fairness, responsibility, transparency, verification