At a hearing of United States House Committee on Science Space and Technology, lawmakers examined paper mills and open access fees, but no shared path for reform emerged. Integrity, cost and access remain in tension.
🔗 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01251-y
#OpenScience #AcademicPublishing #ResearchIntegrity #SciencePolicy #papermills
Nekalé praktiky továren na články ve vědě
Vědecké články pro odborné časopisy a konference na objednávku nebo spoluautorství za úplatu. To jsou takzvané paper mills, tedy továrny na články. Jak fungují a jaký mají vliv na svět vědy, zkoumala Marie Kunešová z Katedry kybernetiky Fakulty aplikovaných věd ZČU.https://pepikhipik.com/2026/05/20/nekale-praktiky-tovaren-na-clanky-ve-vede/
📢 Online-Veranstaltung: „Wissenschaft zwischen Wahrheit und Fake – Wenn der Publikationswahn die Demokratie angreift"
🗓 Di, 12.05.2026, 17–19 Uhr per BBB
💻 https://talk.hshl.de/b/for-leg-xnu-btx
Paper Mills, KI-Fälschungen, „Publish or Perish": Wie schützen wir die Integrität der Forschung?
Mit Dr. Jasmin Schmitz (ZB MED), Prof. Dr. Irma Rybnikova & Prof. Dr. Jörg Meyer (HSHL).
Bitte Anmeldung per Mail: [email protected]
#Wissenschaftskommunikation #OpenScience #ResearchIntegrity #PaperMills #dgiinfo
Update. Related:
"Opening Pandora's box: Paper mills in conference proceedings."
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22458
From the abstract: "This study aims to identify papers in conference proceedings whose titles have been offered for sale on social media platforms. We collected more than 4,000 unique publication offers from more than 200 social media channels and used semi-automated methods along with human assessment to match offers with papers published in IEEE conference proceedings. We identified 1,720 papers in 286 IEEE conference proceedings, accounting for up to 23.51% of an individual conference. These problematic papers are co-authored by more than 6,500 researchers from over 3,500 affiliations in 55 countries."
Paper mills are a growing threat to the integrity of science, yet their penetration in conference proceedings remains underexplored despite conferences being more important than journals in some scientific subfields. This study aims to identify papers in conference proceedings whose titles have been offered for sale on social media platforms. We collected more than 4,000 unique publication offers from more than 200 social media channels and used semi-automated methods along with human assessment to match offers with papers published in IEEE conference proceedings. We identified 1,720 papers in 286 IEEE conference proceedings, accounting for up to 23.51% of an individual conference. These problematic papers are co-authored by more than 6,500 researchers from over 3,500 affiliations in 55 countries. The identified papers demonstrate collaboration anomalies, high diversity of affiliations per paper, citation manipulation, a predominance of six-author papers, and content-based irregularities. Our findings show that paper mills are a large, organized, and often public market that commercializes scientific misconduct, not limited to papers, but infiltrating multiple parts of the research ecosystem.
Update. You can now see the preprint itself, on #arXiv.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.24576
From the abstract: "We assemble BuyTheBy, a large, annotated dataset of timestamped, text-based paper mill advertisements from seven businesses operating out of seven different countries. The dataset consists of 18,710 individual advertisements, of which 15,839 have prices listed. Among these there are 20,598 positions listed as for sale on 5,567 unique products in 14 different product categories with 51,812 timestamped price data points."
The study of paper mills and similar businesses operating in the market for academic and education fraud services is frustrated by the lack of market price data on their various offerings. Here, we assemble BuyTheBy, a large, annotated dataset of timestamped, text-based paper mill advertisements from seven businesses operating out of seven different countries. The dataset consists of 18,710 individual advertisements, of which 15,839 have prices listed. Among these there are 20,598 positions listed as for sale on 5,567 unique products in 14 different product categories with 51,812 timestamped price data points. We perform elementary analysis of this dataset to demonstrate its utility for quantitative understanding of markets for academic fraud services and suggest future use cases.
"Thousands of shady ads sell paper authorship for cash, large-scale investigation finds."
https://www.science.org/content/article/thousands-shady-ads-sell-paper-authorship-cash-large-scale-investigation-finds
PS: This article from _Science_ reports important news about paper mills. But apart from that, note that it draws from an #arXiv preprint that hasn't been released yet. It's a preprint preprint, and from _Science_. A nice example of the ongoing #ScholComm transformation.
Bevor wir zwei spannende Sonderfolgen veröffentlichen - hier der Hinweis auf Folge 32 des #Tuwort-#Podcast!
Die Themen:
- Das Ausmaß wissenschaftlicher #Papermills: Ein Spamfilter gegen Papiermühlen?
- Schnauze voll!? Können #Hunde oder #Katzen besser Wörter lernen?
Andiskutiert:
- Emotionale Nähe durch KI
- Unterschriften-Bschiss in der Schweiz
- Ostdeutsche Körperlichkeit
https://www.tuwort.com/index.php/2026/03/31/tuwort-32/
Viel Spaß beim Hören!
Bevor wir zwei spannende Sonderfolgen veröffentlichen - hier der Hinweis auf Folge 32 des #Tuwort-#Podcast!
Die Themen:
- Das Ausmaß wissenschaftlicher #Papermills: Ein Spamfilter gegen Papiermühlen?
- Schnauze voll!? Können #Hunde oder #Katzen besser Wörter lernen?
Andiskutiert:
- Emotionale Nähe durch KI
- Unterschriften-Bschiss in der Schweiz
- Ostdeutsche Körperlichkeit
https://www.tuwort.com/index.php/2026/03/31/tuwort-32/
Viel Spaß beim Hören!
Our new 📄 in Current Alzheimer Research looks at a strange, and worrying, phenomenon in scientific writing: tortured phrases. Instead of blood-brain barrier, some papers use bizarre alternatives like blood-brain obstruction or blood-cerebrum boundary.
https://doi.org/10.2174/0115672050460224260206052444
These are not just language errors, they can signal deeper issues such as weak #PeerReview or even #PaperMills.
#OpenScience #ResearchIntegrity #Bibliometrics #Neuroethics #AcademicPublishing
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