Octopus affiliations

Although institutional affiliation is not mandatory in scholarly publishing, a new trend of multiple and simultaneous affiliations, which I will call "octopus affiliations" or "octaffiliations" in short, is increasingly noticeable as a distorted consequence of academic ranking and evaluation systems. Institutions offer financial and/or technical supports to authors whose contributions are, in turn, used as a hallmark of productivity, influence, visibility and reputation of their affiliations at national and international levels. While it is understandable that an author can be affiliated with one or two institutions at a time, multiple and simultaneous affiliations, on the other hand, would be hardly realistic.