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Guest editorial: Tackling paper mills

This is a guest editorial and opinions may not reflect official COPE guidance or policies.

A society publisher's perspective

Zara Manwaring, Managing Editor (Biochemical Society/Portland Press)

The initial storm

In June 2020, an anonymous reader flagged via PubPeer over 50 papers in our journal, Bioscience Reports, that had been through peer review and were published with issues in the figures. These papers spanned the course of a few years and the types of issues we saw in these papers varied, from duplications within the same paper, duplications to unrelated papers, and in some cases, outright evidence of image manipulation. It soon became clear that we had been targeted, for some time, by a ‘paper mill’.

We were fortunate that the anonymous reader was reachable, and that they were willing to discuss with us and elaborate on how they had identified some of the issues in the figures, most commonly Western blots, microscopy images, and flow cytometry graphs. In addition to learning how to identify potential paper mill articles and issues in figures as a publisher, supporting the academics on our Editorial Boards to feel confident in the submissions they were handling was essential. We approached Dr Elisabeth Bik, an independent research integrity consultant, who provided our Editorial Board with useful insights into how she and other ‘scientific sleuths’ are able to identify data and ethical issues, as well as advising on additional good practices for Portland Press and the Editorial Board to take forward.

With the support from the Biochemical Society’s Publications Committee, proposals were made to immediately strengthen our editorial policies and peer review processes. Most significant in our initial tackling of these submissions were mandatory requirements for authors to include the raw data pertaining to Western blots (where we were seeing most issues at the time) and a requirement for at least one of the authors to provide us with their current institutional email.

Notices were placed on our journal homepage to notify readers of potential integrity issues in our articles whilst initial investigations took place, and we soon began issuing Corrections, Retractions and Expressions of Concern as appropriate to articles with identified issues, in accordance with COPE guidance and flowcharts.

Moving forward

Our Editor-in-Chief and Deputy-Editor-in-Chief at the time later commented on the challenges paper mill articles presented in their 2021 Editorial A new chapter for a better Bioscience Reports.

We are committed to increasing transparency in our publishing processes, supporting the academic community and other publishers in talking about publication and research integrity issues. As such in 2022, we took the opportunity to share our experience in identifying paper mill submissions and identifying image manipulation at Bioscience Reports with the attendees of the 16th EASE General Assembly and Conference.

We’ve continued to revise and improve our editorial, data and authorship policies, as well as make updates to our submission requirements and peer review processes across our portfolio of journals, resulting in a dramatically decreased volume of suspected paper mill submissions making it through to peer review, and in turn also helping to reduce the burden on our Editorial Boards and Peer Reviewers in the scientific community.

Expanding our tools and resources in the integrity space has meant we’ve become more efficient at identifying these papers, but we continue to see paper mills evolve. We’re looking forward to seeing how collaboration across publishers, big and small, tackles this misconduct throughout the publishing industry.

We acknowledge that we still have work to do to address published articles with known, and unknown, issues. Remaining vigilant, learning from our peers, and sharing our experience remain a priority for us as we continue to develop and implement best practice.

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