Report: “Authorship For Sale: Nature Investigates How Paper Mills Work”

From Nature:

Ivan Oransky, the co-founder of research–integrity blog Retraction Watch, has repeatedly warned of the industrial-level scale of research misconduct, stressing that paper mills are just a symptom of an academic reward system focused on metrics such as university rankings and quantity of publications. In the absence of any other metric, retraction rates are often used to indicate rates of research misconduct, because retractions often occur only when a publisher decides that a paper is too flawed to be fixed with a correction or an erratum.

And these pressures are only intensifying, according to Anna Abalkina, who researches academic fraud, including the use of paper mills, at the Free University of Berlin. She points to two reasons: the increasing number of researchers, and the introduction in many countries of requirements to publish in international journals. Paper mills have stepped in to meet this challenge, she adds.

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Abalkina defines paper mills as “commercial companies that organize on-demand writing of fraudulent academic manuscripts and offer co-authorship of these papers for sale”. For example, International Publisher LLC, a paper mill based in Russia, generated $6.5 million from co-authorship slots offered between 2019 and 2021, according to an analysis by Abalkina¹. She estimates conservatively that the paper-mill industry as a whole is worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year (see ‘A case study of paper-mill purchases in Kazakhstan’).

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In April, Abalkina, Oransky and dozens of other science sleuths, academic whistle-blowers and research-integrity professionals discussed research misconduct, scientific fraud and paper mills at a three-day conference held at the University of Oxford, UK.

Every attendee a Nature careers reporter spoke to agreed that generative AI tools, which can rapidly fabricate images and data sets capable of avoiding detection, would make the problem of intentional scientific fraud a lot worse. “My colleagues and I are concerned that this is a real game changer for paper mills,” says Jana Christopher, an image-integrity analyst at FEBS Press in Heidelberg, Germany. “It gives them so many opportunities.”

Scientific publishers are responding by developing their own technological tools and sharing information to clamp down on fraudulent publishing. Journals have attempted to thwart paper mills by taking measures such as requesting raw data for submitted papers and screening for stock and manipulated images. They’ve been aided by automated tools that detect duplicate papers, unusual citation activity, tortured phrases and other signs of paper mills, although the tools can be costly.

Read the Complete Article (about 3450 words)

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