In today's world of research, publications are the main currency. Amid fierce academic competition, a researcher's salary, position and entire future career depend on the number and success of their published papers. But the constant pressure to publish an ever-growing number of influential research papers has created the perfect environment for a murky business.

This has given rise to a black market flourishing primarily on social media where so-called paper mills operate. Rather than conducting actual research, they mass-produce texts designed to appear credible. For a moderate fee, researchers can buy authorship of such a bogus paper to boost their standing in academic databases. Those selling academic fraud also do everything they can to ensure the paper is actually published in an established academic journal.

To find out just how easy it is to buy authorship of a research paper, we conducted a journalistic experiment and contacted a handful of paper mills.

Let it be said that ERR's editorial team does not advocate using the services of paper mills. Paper mills are fraudulent operations that are wholly at odds with the principles of research ethics and using their services can, in the worst case, result in criminal penalties. Our sole aim was to demonstrate just how absurdly easy it is to get in touch with a paper mill.

A scientist in 20 days and for $800

Paper mills openly market their services on social media. In Facebook communities with seemingly innocuous names such as "Free Scopus publication and research help," various services are advertised using information-packed, AI-generated posters. On the surface, they appear to offer consulting services, but in reality, it is clear they are advertising something else.

We collected contact details for seven of the most active sellers in the groups and messaged them directly on WhatsApp, as instructed in the ads. In the exchanges, we posed as a fictional computer scientist named John Robert Steezy and asked directly about the possibility of buying authorship of a research paper.

We did not have to wait long for help. Of the seven contacts, most of whom had Indian names, five responded within the next half-hour, with WhatsApp notifications constantly lighting up the phone screen.

The offers varied widely. The most expensive paper cost $800 and would have been published in a journal titled the Journal of Intelligent Decision Making and Information Science. According to the seller, publication would have taken just 20 days. Compared with a conventional research paper, which can take months to undergo peer review and editing, this was a ridiculously short period.

The cheapest offer, meanwhile, was just $200, for which the computer scientist was offered co-authorship of a paper in a fisheries journal. Aside from a couple of stranger offers, the paper mills were fairly consistent in quality. At first glance, all the sample papers looked like genuine research papers and only closer examination revealed that some of the figures were illogical or the references arbitrary.

The paper mills' customer service was no less polished. We managed to speak with one seller by phone and a man with an Indian accent explained the publication process and pricing in fluent English. Notably, this particular seller required payment only after the journal's editors had accepted the paper.

Within a few hours, every conversation had reached the point where a single email would have been enough to send the paper off to journals under the fictitious researcher's name. To avoid burdening the research world with even more junk, however, we ended the conversations there. The relentless salespeople continued bombarding the newsroom with WhatsApp messages for days afterward.

Stolen research

Where do paper mills get the seemingly genuine material they sell? This is where an arguably even more dishonest side of this dirty business comes into play: stealing the work of real researchers.

While, as might be expected today, some of the papers offered for sale are generated using artificial intelligence, the information often comes from previously published research. In such cases, paper mills select lesser-known or foreign-language papers, run them through machine translation and alter the wording, tables and graphs to evade plagiarism detection. The aim is to make the paper look genuine at first glance.

That appears to be exactly what happened to Lauri Laanisto, a tenure-track professor of macroecology at the Estonian University of Life Sciences, who discovered last spring that an attempt had been made to republish a study he had worked on in a slightly altered form and under someone else's name. Laanisto first described what happened on his blog.

"It was a lucky coincidence," Laanisto recalled. "Just a couple of months earlier, I had attended a joint meeting in Poland with the editor-in-chief of a journal where I presented those same results and figures. So we were simply lucky that, as editor-in-chief, he happened to scroll through this resubmitted manuscript and noticed that everything looked suspiciously similar," he said.

According to Laanisto, it was an unequivocal case of plagiarism: The title and wording had been changed and a color figure converted to black and white, but the substance of the study remained the same. The paper listed as its author a person purportedly affiliated with a Chinese university, but that person could not be found on the university's website or in academic databases.

Laanisto said the perpetrator's ultimate goal may not even have been to get the paper published. "Perhaps it was a doctoral student who needed to show their supervisor that they had submitted a manuscript somewhere by a certain deadline in order to pass an evaluation. Simply submitting the paper may have been enough," he said.

It could also have been a researcher under pressure who was trying to keep their job. "There are a lot of researchers, competition for funding is fierce and the requirements for keeping an academic position are becoming increasingly demanding. Using paper mills may be the easiest way to build up academic credit. Just as the number of votes is a form of currency for politicians in an election, the equivalent for researchers is the number of papers they have published or their overall body of published research," Laanisto added.

But how do fraudsters get around peer review? As a cornerstone of the modern research system, peer review is supposed to ensure that independent experts scrutinize a study before it is published. Paper mills have their own tricks for circumventing the process.

The most brazen method involves fake peer reviewers. A paper mill recommends fictitious researchers to a journal as potential reviewers, providing email addresses that route the publisher's messages directly to the mill's employees. They then use fake accounts to approve their own work. Another method is to bribe journal editors or create an entire sham journal themselves.

An extensive analysis published in the journal PNAS found nearly 30,000 suspicious paper mill articles in the academic databases examined. Worse still, researchers estimate that around 75 percent of this junk will remain in academic databases permanently. That means future studies or even medical treatment guidelines could end up being based on completely false information.

Mounting pressure to publish

According to Lauri Laanisto, selling co-authorship is nothing new in research, with such fraud having existed for at least 20 years. What has changed, however, is the scale and accessibility of the business. In the past, co-authorship slots were sold during a narrow window after a genuine paper had passed its first round of peer review but before it was published. "But the experiment showed that now the store is essentially open 24/7 — things have changed," he added.

Laanisto pointed to the root of the problem: ever-increasing pressure to publish. "You can be a good researcher, but if you don't publish enough, you aren't successful. At the same time, we've reached a point where you can be a successful researcher without necessarily being a real researcher," he said.

Researchers' working environment has changed dramatically over time. "When I started my master's degree, my supervisor told me that an ecologist's year went like this: You plan an experiment in the spring, carry it out in the summer, analyze the data come fall, write up the paper in the winter and start again in the spring. That gives you one paper a year," Laanisto said.

Today, however, competition is so intense that, for example, an ecologist who publishes fewer than 10 papers a year can no longer maintain a sufficiently high profile, he said. Such pressure inevitably affects the quality of research. "It's obvious that if you've always published one paper a year, you don't suddenly jump to a level where you have 10 times as much new knowledge or 10 times as many results. That can clearly only come from spreading the substance more thinly across papers," Laanisto said.

At the same time, Laanisto noted that while pressure to publish is also a problem for researchers in Estonia, he is not aware of any researchers in the country who use paper mill services. For now, such fraud is predominantly associated with countries that offer state-funded bonuses for published papers, such as China.

Laanisto said pressure to publish could be reduced by placing greater value on qualitative skills in assessing researchers' work, such as good teaching. "Within universities, they probably know better how to distribute that money among people who are actually doing something, such as those who do a good job supervising bachelor's students." In his view, this would ease the pressure created by evaluating researchers solely on the number of their publications.

When it comes to curbing the paper mills' murky business, however, Laanisto believes the most sensible approach would be to impose real consequences for breaches of research ethics. "If you're caught, for example, buying from a paper mill, duplicating data or publishing stolen results, there generally isn't any kind of formal punishment," Laanisto said, describing a situation in which a researcher caught engaging in misconduct can often simply move to another university.

"But if getting caught resulted in an official ban on receiving research funding, that would make people less willing to risk committing fraud," Laanisto said.

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