Paper mills and on-demand publishing: Risks to the integrity of journal indexing and metrics

Retractions, Fake Peer Reviews, and Paper Mills

“…Paper mills create on-demand papers, or parts thereof, for paying clients, and have shown to be a rapidly rising menace in academic integrity that are not easy to detect during peer review since, for example, recycled figures might be widely spread among unrelated clients that publish in widely diverse journals, requiring specialized image manipulation software to detect inter-journal duplication. 29 30 Many apparent paper mills have been found to be associated with hospitals in China. 31 Occasionally, paper brokers and paper mills include fake peer recommendations for the manuscripts they forge.…”

The 1-h fraud detection challenge

“…Includes several citations to interesting non-PubMed indexed papers on publication pressure Moore, 2020 Editorial Argues that unfindable scientific content of predatory journal papers and preprint servers feed the paper mill industry. Plagiarism detection software is fooled and image manipulation detection by the human eye still forms the cornerstone in uncovering paper mill products Hackett and Kelly, 2020 Editorial States that journals, like BiO are victim of the paper mill industry, and defines their strategy (Publishing Ethics Coordinator, in house detection by image spotters, software development, raw data requests upon identification of image issues) to defend against paper mill products Teixeira da Silva, 2021 Letter Argues that besides paper mills and their customers, also reviewers (publons), editors (citations), journals (impact factor), and indexing agencies and search machines benefit from paper mill activities. Upon discovery of a paper mill (paper), all in the publication ecosystem that profit should suffer consequences Mallapaty, 2020 News Reports on new rules from the Chinese science ministry on dealing with research misconduct.…”

Conflicts of Interest Arising from Simultaneous Service by Editors of Competing Journals or Publishers

“…Within an academic context, "moral licensing" could be used to refer to situations where someone does something that is considered to be highly ethical but that allows the person to engage in unethical behavior, because they consider that it is "justified" by a previous ethical deed. The world of academic publishing evolved considerably in the past decade, and in these years, there are more actual or apparent threats to all parties (authors, editors, journals, publishers) and thus also to academic integrity, such as "predatory" publishing or paper mills and their lack of distinction or detection by even the most seasoned editors [66].…”