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Seminar 2021: Authorship for sale

How do we deal with the growing problem of paper mills?

The webinar panelists discussed the prevalence of paper mills, the systematic manipulation of the publication process by individuals or organised groups to guarantee publication, often through sale of authorship or manipulating article acceptance. 

This session is one of nine webinars as part of the COPE Seminar 2021.

Introduction

In this session, the problems of paper mills were discussed—what we know about them, why they exist, and why they are a problem. Paper mills cause issues for publishers and journals, especially smaller journals, and a panel of four speakers discussed what to look out for, how to deal with them, and the COPE guidance currently available. Potential future initiatives that can help tackle the problem were considered, including technological measures, and some of the caveats. 

How can small journals get involved?

Ana Marušić is Professor of Anatomy and Chair of the Department of Research in Biomedicine and Health at the University of Split School of Medicine, Croatia. She is an Honorary Professor at the University of Edinburgh in the UK. Ana is the Co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of Global Health.

Ana explains how small scientific journals can provide information on the root causes of this, giving insights into the inequalities present in the publishing system which force nations, researchers and journals to the peripheries of the mainstream journals which authors are aiming to be publish in, and the ‘vicious circle’ which creates a system perpetuating lack of research funding, financial support for journals, restricted reviewer pools, imperfect communication, poor visibility across global communities. The majority of articles determined to come from paper mills are from Iran, Russia, and China (though other countries are present).

How to detect and manage paper mills

Jigisha Patel is an independent research integrity consultant. She has experience of managing a wide range of research integrity issues as well as developing and implementing strategies to prevent and detect publication misconduct. She led the Research Integrity Group at BioMed Central where she was responsible for maintaining standards and expertise in publication ethics and peer review.

Jigisha describes how paper mill operations work, through three activities: generating manuscripts through fraudulent means, fabricating data or stealing from other journals; guaranteeing publication by agreed acceptance, bribes, or targeting ‘vulnerable’ journals, with less robust screening or quality control mechanism; and collecting payments, by authorships for sale, and payment networks between editors or publishers to accept papers.

To handle cases, Jigisha advised that existing processes for managing unethical activity in articles often overlaps with paper mills, with the additional factor of systematic and large-scale operations.

Combatting paper mills through technology and collaboration

Joris van Rossum is STM's Director of Research Integrity, since January 2021. In his role, Joris supports and coordinates STM’s research integrity and data programs, both integral components of STM’s mission to advance trusted research. Joris van Rossum worked for several leading companies and organisations across the STM publishing space, including Digital Science and Elsevier, where he initiated and led a variety of important innovations and cross-publisher initiatives within the research and publishing ecosystem. Joris holds a master degree in biology and a PhD in philosophy.

Joris van Rossum spoke about the efforts of publishers and the STM Association to advance trust in research though a range of initiatives, some of which address paper mills, through innovations in technology, process improvements to streamline management of cases and cross-publisher task forces, developing tools for activity such as Image Alteration & Duplication Detection, and AI Ethics in Scholarly Communication. He detailed many of the collaborative techniques required between publishers and organisations, looking at necessities, realistic goals and actions, and the difficulty of the tasks in aligning policies, workflows, technical interactions, among many other factors.

The panellists also discussed the complication of publishing data and processes on tackling paper mills, which could help them to navigate around the interventions put in place, though the conclusion was actions need to be taken and transparency is a risk worth taking.

Moderator 

Deborah Kahn has worked in scholarly publishing for over 30 years, most recently at Springer Nature as Executive Vice President BioMed Central and as Global Publishing Director at Taylor & Francis, where she was also responsible for establishing the Publishing Ethics and Integrity team. During her career she gained an advanced understanding and experience of ethical issues in research and journals publishing. Deborah is a COPE Trustee.

Audience questions

The presentations were followed by a question and answer session:

  • How can publishers systematise this resource-intensive work?

  • How can small journals deal with this huge amount of work?

  • What are COPE guidelines for suspicions of paper mill organisation, but papers don’t show other unethical content??

  • When published paper mill articles are eventually retracted is there anything further publishers should consider doing in addition to alerting the editors and informing the institutions?

COPE Webinar: Practical steps for managing paper mills

It is one year since the seminar and COPE is hosting a webinar for journals and publishers at which speakers will share their experience of how they managed paper mills. There will also be practical tips on how to manage paper mills at scale.

Register for the paper mills webinar, 14:00pm - 15:30pm (BST / UTC +1) on Tuesday 20 September

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