One evening in June 2023, Nicholas Wise, a fluid dynamics researcher at the University of Cambridge who moonlights as a scientific fraud buster, was digging around on shady Facebook groups when he came across something he had never seen before. Wise was all too familiar with offers to sell or buy author slots and reviews on scientific papers—the signs of a busy paper mill. Exploiting the growing pressure on scientists worldwide to amass publications even if they lack resources to undertake quality research, these furtive intermediaries by some accounts pump out tens or even hundreds of thousands of articles every year. Many contain made-up data; others are plagiarized or of low quality. Regardless, authors pay to have their names on them, and the mills can make tidy profits.
But what Wise was seeing this time was new. Rather than targeting potential authors and reviewers, someone who called himself Jack Ben, of a firm whose Chinese name translates to Olive Academic, was going for journal editors—offering large sums of cash to these gatekeepers in return for accepting papers for publication.
“Sure you will make money from us,” Ben promised prospective collaborators in a document linked from the Facebook posts, along with screenshots showing transfers of up to $20,000 or more. In several cases, the recipient’s name could be made out through sloppy blurring, as could the titles of two papers. More than 50 journal editors had already signed on, he wrote. There was even an online form for interested editors to fill out.
“Jackpot!” Wise thought, and then, “Oh geez, I’m going to have to report this.”
AT LEAST TENS OF MILLIONS of dollars flow to the paper mill industry each year, estimates Matt Hodgkinson of the independent charity UK Research Integrity Office, which offers support to further good research practices, who is also a council member at the nonprofit Committee on Publication Ethics. Publishers and journals, recognizing the threat, have beefed up their research integrity teams and retracted papers, sometimes by the hundreds. They are investing in ways to better spot third-party involvement, such as screening tools meant to flag bogus papers.
So cash-rich paper mills have evidently adopted a new tactic: bribing editors and planting their own agents on editorial boards to ensure publication of their manuscripts. An investigation by Science and Retraction Watch, in partnership with Wise and other industry experts, identified several paper mills and more than 30 editors of reputable journals who appear to be involved in this type of activity. Many were guest editors of special issues, which have been flagged in the past as particularly vulnerable to abuse because they are edited separately from the regular journal. But several were regular editors or members of journal editorial boards. And this is likely just the tip of the iceberg.
Hodgkinson recalls hearing one publisher say it “had to sack 300 editors for manipulative behavior.” He adds, “These are organized crime rings that are committing large-scale fraud.”
Ben seemed to view co-opting editors as normal business procedure. Reached by phone, he appeared to believe he was being approached by a journal editor looking to collaborate, despite repeatedly being told he was talking to a journalist.
“I have many customers [who] want to publish,” Ben said. He added that he needed partners to help get his papers into journals.
“First time we will pay like this: after accept, half, and after paper online, half,” Ben explained, noting that the kickback’s size would depend on the journal. “You can offer your price.”
When he realized he was not speaking with a journal editor, Ben asked to switch to WhatsApp. In a written exchange he denied paying editors, claiming his company only offered advice about manuscripts, and most of the incriminating posts on his Facebook profile vanished.
But Olive Academic’s relationship with an editor named Malik Alazzam belies Ben’s claim. On LinkedIn, Alazzam describes himself as an “editor of Scopus and ISI journals,” referring to journals included in two leading reputable databases, as well as a former researcher and assistant professor in Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and Jordan. (He did not agree to be interviewed for this story.) Alazzam’s connection to Olive Academic is apparent from the screenshots in Ben’s Facebook posts recruiting new editors and advertising to authors. One of the two papers whose titles could be discerned, “Influencing Factors of Gastrointestinal Function Recovery after Gastrointestinal Malignant Tumor,” was published in a special issue of Hindawi’s Journal of Healthcare Engineering in 2021—and edited by Alazzam. Three days after the article was accepted, the screenshots show Olive Academic paid $840 to Tamjeed Publishing; the company’s website lists Alazzam as the sole member of the team, and Alazzam’s LinkedIn profile says he is an editor there. Other payments, of up to $16,300, showed the first and last letters of the recipient’s name: “M” and “ZZAM.”
Alarming trend
Retractions linked to questionable publishing practices have grown disproportionately, according to Retraction Watch’s database. “Rogue editor” and “peer-review manipulation” can both signal paper mill involvement. (Multiple reasons can be assigned to a single retraction.)
Wise believes Tamjeed’s activity goes beyond Alazzam and that the company acts as a broker, sharing payments from the paper mills with multiple editors—including Omar Cheikhrouhou of Taif University in Saudi Arabia and the University of Sfax in Tunisia. Cheikhrouhou was the editor for the other identifiable paper from Ben’s Facebook posts, “Relationship between Business Administration Ability and Innovation Ability Formation of University Students Based on Data Mining and Empirical Research,” which brought in $1050 for Tamjeed 2 days after acceptance in a special issue of Hindawi’s Mobile Information Systems. (Cheikhrouhou stopped responding to messages after Science requested to interview him.) Cheikhrouhou and Alazzam have both edited other Hindawi special issues and are currently guest editors for several journals published by the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI) and IMR Press.
The two identified papers were retracted on 1 November 2023, when Hindawi and its parent company, Wiley, pulled thousands of papers in special issues because of compromised peer review. (In December, Wiley announced it will “sunset the Hindawi brand.”) “Over the past year, we have identified hundreds of bad actors, present in our portfolio and others, some of whom held guest editorial roles,” a Wiley spokesperson told Science by email. “These individuals have since been removed from our systems.”
OLIVE ACADEMIC AND TAMJEED are far from the only firms employing editors with questionable credentials, or even made up from whole cloth. A Ukrainian paper mill dubbed Tanu.pro, for example, appears to have planted an editor who was either still a student or had just obtained her master’s degree, leveraging journals’ sometimes lax vetting process for editors, according to Anna Abalkina, a social scientist at the Free University of Berlin who identified and described the scheme in a recent preprint.
The editor, Liudmyla Mashtaler, accepted several papers linked to the paper mill through the email addresses used for a 2022 special issue of Review of Education, a title copublished by Wiley and the nonprofit British Educational Research Association (BERA). (The papers were retracted on 5 November 2023, after Abalkina’s preprint appeared.) Mashtaler went on to become a member of the journal’s editorial board. Abalkina found no evidence that Mashtaler has a doctorate, even though she was listed on the editorial board website as “Dr.”; a 2020 Ukrainian government document refers to her as a first-year master’s student. “This is a scandal,” Abalkina says.
Mashtaler, who disappeared from the journal’s editorial board after Science contacted the publisher for this story, continues to edit special issues, sometimes under the last name Obek. She did not respond to repeated emails. BERA said it was working “to tighten procedures for identifying fraudulent activity, including paper mills, following this experience.”
In another case, the editors of a special issue in Hindawi’s Scientific Programming identified via Olive Academic’s ads did not appear to correspond to real people at all. Wise believes the paper mill itself organized the special issue from start to finish—a tactic also described by a scientist who graduated from a medical school in China and tracks paper mills in that country. In such cases the paper mills handle all the correspondence with the journal, including proposing the issue in the first place, either through a real academic colluding with it or by inventing a fake identity for the occasion. “The latest generation paper mill, they’re like the entire production line,” says the researcher, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation against family members in China.
The problem goes beyond special issues. Of nearly a dozen editors of special issues linked to Olive Academic through ads posted by the company on Chinese social media sites, the majority have also held regular editor posts at journals published by Wiley, Elsevier, and others. These include Oveis Abedinia, an electrical engineer at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan who until last year was a regular editor of Complexity, published by Hindawi in partnership with Wiley. (Abedinia did not respond to interview requests via phone or email.) Tamjeed Publishing also appears to have targeted Complexity; on social media, Alazzam listed it as one of the journals his company has “contracted” and invited researchers to publish there.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Ph.D. student Siddhesh Zadey has firsthand experience of such marketing. While he was visiting his parents in India last summer, a Dr. Sarath of iTrilon reached out to him on WhatsApp, offering authorship of “readymade papers” with “100% Acceptance Guarantee.” Angling for more information, Zadey—who is also co-founder of the India-based think tank ASAR, which addresses social problems through research—pretended to be a clueless medical student. “Is the article already accepted?” he asked Sarath. “This says 100% acceptance.”
“Means we have network with Journal editors,” Sarath replied. “So we can guarantee Acceptance.”
One of the journals Sarath claimed to be working with was Health Science Reports, published by Wiley. A spokesperson for the publisher said it had recently issued retractions in the journal “due to peer review manipulation, and there are additional investigations ongoing.”
In an interview, Sarath acknowledged selling authorship but denied iTrilon colluded with editors. “Just we rely on the work,” he said.
However, papers linked to the company reveal likely editor involvement. In Sarath’s pitch to Zadey, he touted five author slots available on an already-accepted “original research article.” The paper went on to be published in the journal Life Neuroscience just 14 days after the ad was posted, with six total authors—two of whom are also high-level editors at the journal.
One of them was the paper’s corresponding and final author—Nasrollah Moradikor, director of the International Center for Neuroscience Research (ICNR) in Georgia, where Sarath told Zadey the work was conducted. (Other authors on the paper are based in India, South Korea, and Spain.) Moradikor did not agree to be interviewed. But as corresponding author, he must have been aware of the postacceptance author additions.
The other author-editor, Indranath Chatterjee, a professor of computer science at Tongmyong University in South Korea, told Science he did not know what kind of services iTrilon provides nor that his paper had been advertised by the company. But he acknowledged there had been authorship changes on the paper because “some expertise of some other people” had been required. In September 2023, he gave a talk on scientific publishing organized by iTrilon and ICNR. Both Moradikor and Chatterjee are also editors at other journals, Chatterjee as a section chief editor at Neuroscience Research Notes and Moradikor as a guest editor for publishers such as MDPI, De Gruyter, and AIMS Press.
PUBLISHERS ARE QUICK to point out that most of the tens of thousands of editors they work with are honest and professional. But they also say they are under siege. A spokesperson for Elsevier said every week its editors are offered cash in return for accepting manuscripts. Sabina Alam, director of publishing ethics and integrity at Taylor & Francis, said bribery attempts have also been directed at journal editors there and are “a very real area of concern.”
Jean-François Nierengarten of the University of Strasbourg, co-chair of the editorial board of Chemistry–A European Journal, published by Wiley, was targeted in June 2023. He received an email from someone claiming to be working with “young scholars” in China and offering to pay him $3000 for each paper he helped publish in his journal.
But Xiaotian Chen, a librarian at Bradley University who has studied paper mills in China, says publishers are not blameless. Chen points out that publishing houses have shown no sign of cutting back on the tens of thousands of special issues they put out every year in open-access journals—reportedly the preferred target for paper mills. Such issues generate hefty profits from the publication fees paid by authors. “Some of the for-profit publishers, they’re just as greedy as a paper mill,” Chen says. “And they count heavily on the contribution from Chinese authors to survive.”
China is a major market for fake papers, and critics say measures to rein in paper mills there have been largely ineffectual. According to a new preprint, more than half of Chinese medical residents say they have engaged in research misconduct such as buying papers or fabricating results. One reason is that publications, though no longer always a strict requirement for career advancement, are still the easiest path to promotion in a range of professions, including doctors, nurses, and teachers at vocational schools, according to sources in China. Yet these groups may have neither the time nor the training to do serious research, Chen says. In such a setting, paying a few hundred or even thousand dollars to see one’s name in print may seem a worthwhile investment, he says.
The towering demand for academic articles is not unique to China. In Russia and several ex-Soviet countries, for example, policies focused on publication metrics, coupled with a culture of corruption and the transition to market economy, have contributed to a similar situation, according to Abalkina. Research output is also gaining importance in India as universities there strive to climb rankings and junior doctors and scientists vie for prestigious jobs at home and abroad. Some universities even require undergraduates to publish papers as part of their curricula, a trend academics say is spreading.
“Students are really desperate to get research papers in whichever way possible,” Zadey says. “No one really cares about the outcomes,” he adds. “It’s all about outputs.”
Although publishers have ramped up their efforts against fraud, including establishing a hub for information sharing, critics say it’s too little and too late. “They were too naïve, the real editors, the real people running these journals,” says Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist who spends her time scanning scientific papers for signs of fraud. At a meeting for journal editors she attended last year, “people were saying, ‘Yeah, we’ve been asleep at the wheel,’” Bik recalls. “And now we need to sort of deal with that damage.”
Zadey agrees with the need to tackle paper mills, but he worries about the implications for global research inequities. “There is going to be a whole lot of added scrutiny for people with my face and my name when we try to publish.”
IN JULY 2023, Wise reported his findings about Olive Academic to several major publishers. Most promised to investigate and said they would circle back to him once they knew more or if they needed further information. So far, he hasn’t heard back. “Whilst these investigations do certainly take time, I am a bit disheartened, if not surprised,” he says.
Editors trying to safeguard their journals can also get discouraged. When Jer-Shing Huang of the Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technology in Germany joined Elsevier’s journal Optik as editor-in-chief 1 year ago, his hope was to help junior scientists, particularly those in the Global South, improve their manuscripts. Instead, Huang says he ended up trying “to clean up the mess.”
It turned out that Optik, which was delisted from Web of Science in 2023, had a massive paper mill problem. Olive Academic was among its attackers. With Elsevier’s blessing, Huang says, he started “rejecting a lot of really bad papers every day,” as well as proposals for special issues. He also introduced policies requiring supervision of guest editors of special issues, which he said had been major drivers of the journal’s growth. And he set about combing through hundreds of suspect papers that had already appeared.
Before he went on vacation last summer, Huang says, he had retracted more than 20 papers. But it was grueling work, and he had no idea how many more papers were left to check. “I’m really killed by this,” he says.
Last fall, Huang told Elsevier he would resign as editor-in-chief. Not only was he spending his time fighting fires instead of doing science, he had also been attacked on the online forum PubPeer in what he believed was an act of revenge by paper mills rattled by his efforts. The publisher eventually convinced him to stay, but Huang remains conflicted. “This is not at all what I had imagined.”
