Fighting Paper Mills: A Publisher’s Perspective
Criminal organizations selling fraudulent research articles and authorship slots have been on the rise for the last few years. But how big of a problem are these paper mills really? How do they lure researchers into using their services? And how can we stop them? Drawing on our experiences at De Gruyter Brill, we explore what's really at stake.
Let’s address the elephant in the room: Everyone is panicking about paper mills and wondering what to do about them. Paper mills – criminal organizations that sell fraudulent research articles or authorship on such papers – tend to attract a lot of media attention these days. However, it’s important to keep a sense of perspective. There is a lot of noise in our industry about papermills. But, while there is no single reliable global percentage, some estimates (see for example: How big is science’s fake-paper problem?) suggest that paper-mill material may account for roughly 1–3% of scholarly output overall.
While that’s still a relatively small proportion, we’re not taking the problem lightly.
What makes paper mills really challenging is their sophistication. In some cases, the problem is not just fabricated papers; it’s the coordinated manipulation of submission and peer review processes. Accordingly, there is a need for a coordinated, industry-wide response.
Our Experiences with Paper Mills
Although our data does not suggest that a lot of fraudulent papers have been published at De Gruyter Brill, we have been seeing paper mill submissions for some time. In 2023/24, during a large paper mill attack, we had to remove over 1,000 research articles from several journals’ submissions systems. To this day, we receive potential paper mill articles on a regular basis – in some subject areas and journals more so than in others.
“Once we started systematically rejecting papers suspected of originating from paper mills, we gradually received fewer of them.”
Since the attack, we have introduced stricter monitoring and preventive measures. One way to identify fraudulent papers is to use a duplicate submission checker. While not all duplicate submissions originate from paper mills, we do know that all paper mill documents are submitted multiple times – that is their business model, after all.
We noticed that once we started systematically rejecting papers suspected of originating from paper mills, we gradually received fewer of them. This suggests that either paper mill organizations or authors using their services observe the publishing market, recognize the difficulties, and avoid journals with stricter control measures.
Are Open Access Journals Particularly at Risk?
There is a notion that Open Access journals may be a “better” venue for paper mill publications – which may be partially true. Open Access journals are easier to target. All of the content is accessible and easier to scan, making it simpler to prepare manuscripts accordingly.
Also, when publishers have financial incentives – in the form of author-paid publication fees – there may be a tendency to accept more papers without conducting proper peer review, resulting in higher revenues for the publisher. There are, in fact, many predatory journals operating this way.
We work hard to convince the scientific community that both our Open Access as well as our subscription journals apply strict procedures to assess fraudulent papers and detect any form of malpractice. One of our most important points of reference are the guidelines by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
Reasons for the Rise of Paper Mills
The drivers of fraudulent publishing are structural. We still live in a publish or perish environment, in which publishing incentives for researchers are linked to their careers, funding, and institutional targets. This creates demand for services that promise rapid publication. While the pressure may vary depending on the academic institution or subject area, in STEM fields it seems to be higher than in the humanities and social sciences.
“Researchers are being pressured from different angles.”
This situation triggered the rise of paper mill organizations in the very beginning, and their number is still increasing. In order to attract more authors, they are now expanding their reach by using communication channels, such as WhatsApp and Telegram, to promise easy publications for a fee. They also use social media and their own networks. They even plant editors or guest editors in journals. Researchers are being pressured from different angles.
Worryingly, many scientists do not regard purchasing an article or a slot in the authors’ list from paper mills as a criminal activity. Even if they recognize the unfairness of it, they feel pressured to resort to such solutions anyway.
Structural Changes
How do we break this chain of events?
Of course, there are already corrective mechanisms in place – on our side in the form of rejecting a manuscript or retracting it, if it’s already published. Academic institutions also have their own procedures to penalize researchers if they’re found guilty of fraudulent publishing behavior.
“In an ideal world, purchasing an article would no longer be quite so directly beneficial to a researcher’s career – and thus no longer lucrative to paper mills.”
However, eliminating the fundamental factors that encourage researchers to use paper mill services would be the most effective solution. In an ideal world, purchasing an article would no longer be quite so directly beneficial to a researcher’s career – and thus no longer lucrative to paper mills. Achieving that means dramatically changing how academics and their work are assessed at an institutional level, moving beyond the world of ‘publish or perish’.
What’s Next?
First and foremost, our responsibility in the publication ethics space is to maintain the integrity of the scholarly record. To stay on top of things in a publishing environment that changes ever so rapidly, we will need improved reporting, more tools, and more data. We will also need to work even more closely with editors and researchers to make them aware of current developments and tools to manage fraudulent publishing behaviour.
We will need to keep up — and in practical terms that means we will be rolling out the STM Hub to even more journals this year and helping editors and journals to reject more papermill and other fraudulent papers at the point of submission. This will prevent more papermill papers from being published in the first place and should also have the deterrent effect of disincentivizing further submissions from the same bad actors in the future. Again, prevention is better than cure!
Learn more about Research Integrity at De Gruyter Brill in our interview with Agnieszka Bednarczyk-Drąg and Darren Green!
[Title image by JJ Ying via Unsplash]