https://www.science.org/content/article/paper-mills-bribing-editors-scholarly-journals-science-investigation-finds

Someone has uncovered editors of mainstream journals taking bribes from
paper mills. It looks like the paper mills (someone pays to get to be
an author of a paper that the paper mill produced or even fabricated)
are bribing editors to get their papers published.

Time will tell how widespread this practice will become.

Everyone might recall that Sternberg facilitated the publication of
Meyer's Cambrian explosion denial paper. Once the paper was published
it was determined not to be the usual type of paper published by that
taxonomic journal, and it was found that Sternberg had put the paper
through peer review himself instead of assigning someone else to get the
paper reviewed. Sternberg selected the reviewers (they have not been
identified) and supposedly the paper passed that peer review. The
journal retracted the paper, and Sternberg had already left as editor.
Sternberg's motivation wasn't monetary as far as anyone knows, but
political. He believed in the ID perp's political mission and
eventually joined the ID scam becoming an ID perp himself in order to
accomplish that mission. It may have not be for money, but the
Discovery Institute has paid a heavy bill for what was done. They have
had Sternberg on salary since 2007 with hardly any evidence that
Sternberg has been doing much of anything for what they pay him to do.
He was associated with the Biologic Institute (supposedly the research
arm of the ID scam) but the ID perps shut down that unit years ago. The
web page is still up, but hasn't been updated since 2017. He stopped
publishing in real science journals, and I do not recall him
contributing the ID scam BioComplexity journal. The only thing that I
recall is that he worked on some video about gaps in the whale fossil
record. He obviously could not do anything with his experience in
invertebrate taxonomy to keep ID out there as bait.

The Discovery Institute has been paying Sternberg since 2007 so how much
has that retracted paper cost the ID scam?

Ron Okimoto