Systematic manipulation of the publishing process via 'paper mills'
The Forum discussion Systematic manipulation of the publishing process via “paper mills” discussion was held on 4 September 2020.
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Increasingly, across the research publishing landscape, large scale manipulations of the publication process are being seen. The production of fraudulent papers at scale via alleged ‘paper mills’ is one such manipulation.
Paper mills are profit oriented, unofficial and potentially illegal organisations that produce and sell fraudulent manuscripts that seem to resemble genuine research. They may also handle the administration of submitting the article to journals for review and sell authorship to researchers once the article is accepted for publication. Indications that manuscripts may be produced by a paper mill are more readily detected at scale as they may be similar in layout, experimental approach and have similar images or figures.
What are the issues?
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Publishers and editors are being alerted to many potentially problematic published articles that may indicate the involvement of alleged paper mills because they all contain possibly problematic research images (eg, Western blots and flow cytometry data).
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Paper mills are difficult to spot until there is a bulk of published papers that can be compared, often across publishers.
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Asking for raw data from the authors is a logical first step, but collecting and checking the data is not straightforward. This is especially the case if data files require specialist software and the raw data may not seem obviously problematic when assessed in isolation on a case-by-case basis.
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There are difficulties in detecting use of ‘stock images’ as they have no obvious manipulations per se and data can be provided. The issue is only apparent across multiple published papers.
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Correspondence can be difficult because it is unclear if approaching real authors or paper mill agents.
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Approaching institutions may be difficult when it is not clear who to approach or there is a lack of response.
Questions
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While publishers and editors can handle individual papers on a case-by-case basis, how do we tackle the bigger issues at play?
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What can publishers do to improve the screening processes to detect these problems earlier?
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Are there key author declarations that could be suggested that researchers make?
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Even for journals which do not have a mandatory data sharing policy, should authors be asked to store their original data/images in open or institutional repositories so that data are at least available on request?
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Can COPE play an active role?
This was discussed at the start of our COPE Forum on 4 September 2020 with guest speaker Elisabeth Bik (Microbiome and Science Integrity Consultant).
Your comments
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Comments
We have recently retracted two papers that were identified as part of a group of eight papers with identical figures and tables. We have tightened up processes as outlined in this editorial: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsob.200165
Phil Hurst, Royal Society
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I would like to contribute to the discussion. Recently a report on translation plagiarism was published by Russian academy of sciences. https://kpfran.ru/wp-content/uploads/plagiarism-by-translation-2.pdf (August 2020, in Russian). The main results of the research that there are paper mills which offer co-authorship for sale. Such paper mills take the texts in the Russian language (already published) , translate the texts into English and submit to international journals. The probability to detect translation plagiarism by editors is really low, The authors of the report found 259 such papers with plagiarism and susicious co-authorship which were published in different international journals. More than 1000 researchers are involved in the co-athorship of these 259 papers. In other words, transltion plagiarism is a challenge. Anna Abalkina, co-author of the report, researcher at LMU ([email protected])
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Can technology play a role in detecting fraudulent papers, which are actually tweaked from other published papers?
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Unfortunately I will miss the actual forum but as a journal editor I would like to make a couple of comments.
1) My senior editors and I have become aware of increasing numbers of papers with the papermill characteristics. However, it is relatively easy to spot these beyond the obvious origins of the submissions - organisational, text and data similarities, lack of previous studies and generic hypotheses etc. However, the question now is how will these submissions 'adapt' to renewed scrutiny?
2) Editorial teams have frequently been accused of complicity in the papermills fraud - or at least turning a blind eye. However, the shear scale of the problem means that it is incredibly difficult for over-worked academics to get to grips with this issue. I think we have to recognise that sometimes journals are simply overwhelmed.
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