New research paper highlights key questions to tackle the growing threat of paper mills

Research paper mills — covert organizations that produce fraudulent manuscripts for profit — pose a significant threat to science and scholarship. These unethical entities scale their operations using AI, sell authorship positions, and manipulate peer review, eroding trust in research and slowing progress in critical areas such as innovation, healthcare, and policy. 

United2Act — a joint initiative by COPE and STM — has spent the past year taking decisive action to address the collective challenge of paper mills in scholarly publishing. Most recently, members of the United2Act working group on research have published a paper in PLOS Biology that outlines five critical questions that require urgent research to understand and address the scale, impact, and operations of paper mills:

• What are the features of paper mill products? Understanding these features is essential for detection and deterrence.

• What is the scale of the paper mill problem? How widespread are these publications across fields and over time?

• How do paper mills operate and evade detection? Investigating their methods is key to dismantling their operations.

• To what extent are researchers and scholars aware of paper mills? Awareness levels vary across disciplines, and education efforts must be informed by evidence.

• How are paper mills affecting science and scholarship? From citations to research practices, understanding their impact is vital to safeguarding the research ecosystem.

A Call to Action

The paper underscores the urgent need for dedicated funding, research, and collaborative efforts to combat paper mills and protect the integrity of science. Without bold and decisive action, paper mills will continue to scale, especially with the growing use of generative AI to fabricate manuscripts that are increasingly difficult to detect.

Watch this short video below for key takeaways — and access the full paper here. 

The United2Act initiative brings together publishers, researchers, institutions, and infrastructure leaders to tackle this collective challenge. By answering these critical questions, we can take the next steps to identify, expose, and eliminate paper mills — preserving trust in science for generations to come.