A high-profile group of funders, academic publishers and research organizations has launched an effort to tackle one of the thorniest problems in scientific integrity: paper mills, businesses that churn out fake or poor-quality journal papers and sell authorships. In a statement released on 19 January, the group outlines how it will address the problem through measures such as closely studying paper mills, including their regional and topic specialties, and improving author-verification methods.
Detecting these articles is difficult — although there are growing technological efforts to spot them — and shutting down the operations that produce them is even harder. Researchers are also concerned that the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools will exacerbate the problem by providing more ways to quickly generate fake papers that can dodge current detection methods.
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Several efforts will be needed to make a dent in the problem, say researchers. “Paper mills are very shape shifting. They anticipate what we’re doing. They will know what we’re doing, and they will change what they do,” says [Deborah Kahn, an elected council member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)]. “The thing that’s exciting about this is that we are actually starting to do the work.”
