Leading scientists ‘appalled’ to find sham papers have been attributed to them say case against UK-registered publishers is overdue

Leading international scientists who discovered articles written by artificial intelligence that have been published in their name have backed plans for legal action.

In recent months, academics at leading universities in Europe, North America and Australia have been alerted to low-quality scholarly articles – often little more than a page long, probably written by a language scraping algorithm – appearing in their name in titles published by Prime Scholars, an open access publisher registered to a west London address. That office, where hundreds of UK companies are incorporated, is also home to other digital periodical companies whose authors are usually from India, the Middle East or developing economies.

In some cases, eminent scientists have even been falsely listed as editors of Prime Scholars’ 56 journals, which include the British Journal of Research, the American Journal of Advanced Drug Delivery and the European Journal of Experimental Biology. The deceptive listings and fraudulent papers are apparently used to add respectability to titles and lure authors from developing countries to pay what is described as a “modest publication fee”. Thousands of university staff have apparently published with the outfit, believed to be operating in India.