In Estonia, journalists test how co-authorship of scientific papers is sold
Journalists from Estonia’s ERR News conducted an experiment involving so-called paper mills and, within several hours, received offers to buy co-authorship on papers for academic journals for $200–800.
The outlet contacted seven active sellers via WhatsApp who advertised their services in Facebook groups. The journalists posed as a fictional computer science specialist, John Robert Stizi. Five contacts replied within half an hour, while the account created by the outlet received more than 20 offers.
Publication offers
The most expensive offer was $800: the seller said that the article could be published in the Journal of Intelligent Decision Making and Information Science within 20 days. The cheapest option—co-authorship on a paper for a fisheries journal—cost $200.
According to ERR News, the samples provided initially resembled genuine scientific papers, but a closer examination revealed illogical illustrations or arbitrary source references. One seller explained the procedure by phone and said that payment was required only after the journal’s editorial office accepted the paper. The journalists stopped corresponding before submitting materials to the journals in order to prevent new unreliable publications from appearing.
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Reworked research
Paper mills may use the work of real scientists: little-known or foreign-language studies are machine-translated, with wording, tables, and graphs altered in an attempt to bypass plagiarism checks. Some texts are also generated with the help of artificial intelligence.
Lauri Laanisto, a professor of macroecology at the Estonian University of Life Sciences, said that last spring he discovered an attempt to republish a study he had worked on under a changed title and another person’s name. According to him, the content of the work effectively remained the same, while the author, allegedly affiliated with a Chinese university, could not be found either on the institution’s website or in academic databases.
Peer-review evasion schemes
Laanisto noted that the sale of co-authorship has existed for at least 20 years but has now become much more accessible. He cited growing pressure on researchers over the number of publications as one reason.
Among the schemes for bypassing peer review, ERR News names the use of fictitious reviewers: a paper mill proposes invented experts to a journal and provides email addresses controlled by its employees. Bribes to editors or the creation of fake journals may also be used. An analysis published in the journal PNAS identified nearly 30,000 suspicious papers in the academic databases studied.
