In 2019, Retraction Watch ran an exclusive story of a Russian paper mill operating under the business name “International Publisher LLC”. Since then, Retraction Watch and other scientific news and blogging sites have continued to report on the activities of research paper mills, including International Publisher and its primary website, 123mi.ru. These mills provide an array of fraudulent services to researchers and academics seeking to publish articles in peer-reviewed journals. The services they provide include ghostwriting, brokering authorship positions on papers accepted for publication, and falsifying data.
A very interesting deeper dive into the troubling operation of paper mills. These lucrative and shady businesses have the potential to do serious damage to the scholarly ecosystem and public trust in research and academia. A useful read for anyone responsible for an institution’s Research Integrity arrangements. We need to have good detection systems and harshly punish users of paper mills. We have included links to 11 related items.
So far, we have identified nearly 200 published articles that may have been brokered through this paper mill and which cross disciplines including (but not limited to) humanities, social sciences, nursing, and education. We also observe numerous papers on COVID-19 that have been or currently are advertised for sale.
