When Northwestern University researchers revealed widespread and increasing research fraud in scientific publishing, some journal editors were undoubtedly and initially hesitant to share the findings. However, the amount of misrepresentation has grown exponentially to the point where it cannot be ignored.

During August, Dr. Luis A. Nunes Amaral and his team of scientists published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, revealing that 1 to 10 percent of papers in the literature are fraudulent, with the true rate potentially 10 to 100 times higher. Certain fields, like microRNA studies in cancer, show especially high fraud rates.

For some time, the scale and speed of this problem have been alarming, with compelling evidence showing that fabricated data and manipulated results are surpassing genuine scientific work. The PNAS study also revealed that networks driving large-scale scientific fraud are extensive, resilient, and rapidly growing.

However, a recent article published by Real Clear Investigations not only details the manner in networks or paper mills producing questionable, research but that many of the culprits involved in the improprieties hail from countries such as Russia, India, and China. What’s surprising, RCI says, is that the entities involved are open about what they do offering legitimate services likely as a way to masque their deceitful activities that can even involve paying bribes to journal insiders in order to get their papers published.

These sophisticated outfits also engage in trickery to get papers published, infiltrating journals with their own editors and reviewers and even resorting to bribery, according to investigators and a white paper from Wiley, a New Jersey-based publisher. The scale of the fraud is eye-popping: One Wiley subsidiary, Hindawi, retracted more than 8,000 articles two years ago for suspected paper mill involvement. 

U.S. universities and regulators have been able to brush off the threat of paper mills because they have mostly sold their services in China, where research integrity standards are rarely enforced, according to experts. But these rogue operators are building on their success in Asia and expanding to the U.S. and Western Europe, where the prize is the prestige of naming an author on an article from a famous university. …

The website of India’s Peer Publicon Consultancy, for instance, leads off with an offer to correct the grammar and spelling on medical-related papers. That’s fine. Then comes the offer of help in every facet of writing and publishing a literature review article for about $300. Dig deeper to find this suspect offer: “You can join as a co-author for the review articles we prepare for publication in indexed journals.” …

In Russia, a paper mill called International Publisher says it operates in a glassy tower in central Moscow and claims to have published more than 4,000 papers, some in high-impact journals. “We can help teach authors how to write articles that will be accepted into international journals,” according to its website. “We can also handle any aspects of the work ourselves.” That includes enhancing the “scientific value of the article (improving the research, updating the relevance and analysis, logically organizing the content, strengthening the conclusion).” The pricing is laid out in a chart: Writing or revising a paper costs $2,400, and getting it published in a top-ranked journal is an additional $4,200.

Unfortunately, according to RCI, not only are the paper mills very profitable, but they are also seeking clients elsewhere resulting from push back from journals who scrutinize manuscripts from the three aforementioned countries.

The Open Access model also has a harmful downside: journals publish papers in exchange for payment, often accepting low-quality work as long as the fee is paid. The more they publish, the more profit they make. Publishers are aware that substandard papers, often from developing countries, are being submitted, but they continue to publish them if the authors can pay. Production costs no longer limit publishers’ output.

However, with the number of indexed published papers surging to over 2.8 million in 2022, publishers cannot screen every paper for all forms of misconduct, RCI says. They typically identify and reject only those submissions that are blatantly fraudulent.

To tackle the surge in fraudulent research, fortunately, journals are intensifying their defenses against paper mills. A Wiley spokesperson informed RCI that they’ve created AI-driven detection tools to catch suspicious papers before peer review and are expanding their internal integrity teams. Publishers like Taylor & Francis are also addressing authorship sales by implementing measures to prevent paper mills from altering author names.

The effort to screen out fraudulent research will be an extremely difficult but necessary undertaking.

Some journals did not even want to send it for review because they didn’t want to call attention to these issues in science, especially in the U.S. right now with the Trump administration’s attacks on science, Dr. Amaral told Inside Higher Ed, But if we don’t, we’ll end up with a corrupt system.