Since 2019, Anna Abalkina has been monitoring a web site that gives a bootleg manner for scientists to burnish their CVs. The website, operated from Russia, overtly gives to promote authorship slots on soon-to-be-published scientific papers, for charges starting from a number of hundred {dollars} to just about $5000.
Abalkina, a sociologist on the Free University of Berlin, has documented what seems to be a flourishing enterprise on the location, www.123mi.ru. Since it debuted in December 2018, she has analyzed greater than 1000 commercials posted there and located a minimum of 419 that appeared to match manuscripts that later appeared in dozens of various journals, she reported in a preprint posted on arXiv in March.
More than 100 of those recognized papers have been revealed in 68 journals run by established publishers, together with Elsevier, Oxford University Press, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wolters Kluwer, and Wiley-Blackwell, though most of those have been specialised publications. Russian authors outnumbered some other nationality on the web site’s tally of current contracts.
Run by International Publisher LLC, the location is one among many illicit “paper mills” that leaders in scientific publishing fear are more and more corrupting the literature by promoting bogus authorship or prewritten papers. But its scale and brazenness are uncommon, as are the insights Abalkina has gleaned into its workings.
Her findings are “fascinating,” says Elisabeth Bik, an unbiased science integrity professional in San Francisco who believes they replicate fallout from Russia’s 2012 choice to set insurance policies tying researchers’ promotions and monetary rewards to their quantity of scholarly publications.
“It is another example of what can go wrong in scientific publishing if the pressure to publish is increased,” says Bik, who has studied paper mills primarily based in China.
To lure potential clients, the commercials on www.123mi.ru present tantalizing particulars about every paper, which it claims are already accepted for publication. They embrace its matter, the variety of authors, and generally its summary. The commercials additionally present hints in regards to the status and affect of the journal by which the paper will seem, together with whether or not it’s listed within the Scopus and Web of Science databases.
Prices for authorship slots range relying on their place within the authors listing and the affect issue of the journal, Abalkina discovered. Costs have diverse from about 15,000 rubles ($175) to 410,000 rubles ($4800), with first creator slots normally the costliest. Based on these charges, Abalkina estimates that from 2019 to 2021, International Publisher raked in about $6.5 million. (The web site doesn’t specify how a lot its clients truly paid.) To hold the offers hush-hush, the contract features a confidentiality clause.
The commercials withhold the title of the journal, which the purchaser is informed solely after paying the payment. Abalkina’s paper quotes claims by the web site that it has break up its charges with some unidentified journals to make sure their participation within the scheme.
Several of the most important publishers of journals recognized in Abalkina’s research—Oxford University Press, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley-Blackwell—say they’re inspecting papers recognized by Abalkina that she dropped at their consideration. When contacted by Science, an Elsevier spokesperson pledged to look into the problem however didn’t subsequently verify whether or not the writer is probing the flagged articles.
Chris Graf, director of analysis integrity at Springer Nature, declined to debate specifics however known as paper mills “bad for both the research and the publishing communities. Alongside investigating individual cases and retracting compromised papers, we’ve been reviewing our processes and making investments in technologies to help us identify attempts to manipulate our systems.”
Science contacted International Publisher—which says it’s headquartered in Moscow and has workplaces in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Iran—for remark a number of occasions by e mail, cellphone, and WhatsApp however acquired no response. Its chief editor, in line with her LinkedIn web page, is Ukraine-based philologist Ksenia Badziun, who says she graduated from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. The firm has continued to function throughout Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Science additionally contacted 20 corresponding authors of papers recognized by Abalkina; most didn’t reply. One, who requested to not be named, stated he is aware of nothing about International Publisher or its actions and that each one listed co-authors contributed to the work.
Kim-Hung Pho, a statistician at Ton Duc Thang University who co-authored two of the flagged research—each revealed by Digital Scholarship within the Humanities, run by Oxford University Press—additionally informed Science he has no information of www.123mi.ru. “I don’t have any funds to do scientific research, so I have absolutely no money to buy [authorship in] these articles, and there is no pressure to do this.”
In 2021, publishers retracted a document 724 articles traced to paper mills, a part of a grand whole of greater than 1000 such articles retracted throughout the previous decade, in line with a database maintained by the Retraction Watch web site. (More than 4 million scholarly papers at the moment are revealed yearly.)
At least two nonprofit teams that advocate for trustworthy practices in publishing have issued steering to journal editors about how you can deter bought authorships. The Committee on Publication Ethics and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors advocate that editors require authors who request so as to add an creator after submitting a manuscript to offer an evidence and signed permission from all different listed authors.
But some observers recommend journal editors ought to do extra. If they uncover papers with authors who paid to be listed, they need to flag them by attaching a written “expression of concern” as a result of “any association with the mill raises some question about the integrity of the paper,” says Bryan Victor, who research social work at Wayne State University. In December 2021, he co-authored a separate evaluation of www.123mi.ru on Retraction Watch, which described almost 200 papers that will match authorships marketed there; subsequently, he and a colleague posted a catalog of contracts displayed on the location, which collectively check with about 1500 articles.
Anna AbalkinaIlker Doğan
Whether editors may have recognized fraudulent authors earlier than publication stays murky. But the papers do supply clues, Abalkina discovered. For instance, a couple of listing authors in a number of unrelated educational departments, making it unlikely they collaborated. In different circumstances, the authors’ specialties don’t match the manuscript’s title.
But to keep away from scrutiny from editors, International Publisher seems to observe a method of not repeatedly focusing on the identical journals, Abalkina says. “That makes it impossible for an editor to detect some anomalies,” she says.