The Committee on Publishing Ethics (Cope) is urging immediate action to tackle the threat posed by paper mills, which it says are ‘polluting’ the scholarly record with fake research articles. Paper mills are third-party companies that produce and sell falsified research papers and authorship spots.
Cope, which is charged with defining best practice in the ethics of scholarly publishing and has a code of conduct it expects publishers to follow, issued its position statement on paper mills on 19 January. The statement coincides with a separate declaration on paper mills that was released by United2Act, a group of international stakeholders working together to tackle the problems created by paper mills. The United2Act statement, signed by more than a dozen organisations involved in scholarly publishing, including the Royal Society of Chemistry, called paper mills a danger to the integrity of the scholarly record and said collective action is needed as no individual stakeholder can solve this problem alone.
Specifically, the United2Act statement recommends key collaborative actions to help address the problem of paper mills, including creating new educational resources to raise awareness about paper mills among researchers, journal editors, reviewers and publishers. It also calls on these stakeholders to: speed up post-publication corrections of the literature when misconduct is discovered; organise research on paper mills with a focus on regional and subject specific aspects; and work to develop new tools to verify the identity of authors, reviewers, and editors.
According to a recent estimate by Nature, hundreds of thousands of paper mill publications have infiltrated the world’s scientific literature. A recent investigation by Science and the Retraction Watch website has uncovered apparent cases of bribery in which rogue editors were reportedly paid to accept fake papers produced by paper mills.