Last year, Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’s Archives of Pharmacology found itself on the receiving end of what its editor Roland Seifert called a “massive attack of fraudulent papers” that were the product of paper mills.
Paper mills are an insidious cancer on the body of scientific knowledge. They are infecting and infiltrating the body of scientific knowledge and corrupting knowledge and the systems based on research outputs. Institutions, funding bodies and publications need to have systems to spot when an academic submits work that is apparently been purchased from a paper mill. Any such behaviour should be treated harshly and the offending academic face serious consequences. Research integrity professional development must warn academics away from paper mills and highlight the serious career costs of trying to publish work that has been purchased from a mill.
We won’t reproduce the list in its entirety, but here are a few highlights, in no particular order.
Seifert states that his journal’s investigation found that authors linked to paper mills always used commercial instead of academic email addresses:
Often, the email addresses had little relation to the name of the corresponding author. In several cases, authors claimed that their institutions do not provide them with academic email addresses. Evidently, the lack of use of academic email addresses renders identification of the fraud authors much more difficult, if not impossible. In the meantime, we have learned that all “real” academic institutions across the world provide academic email addresses. It has just become a bad global habit that many scientists use commercial email addresses for convenience, and this security gap is aggressively exploited by paper mills. Therefore, our journal does not allow anymore submissions without a valid academic (or pharmaceutical company) email address.
