Systematic manipulation of the publishing process via “paper mills”
Increasingly, across the research publishing landscape, publishers are seeing large scale manipulation of the publication process. The production of fraudulent papers at scale via alleged ‘paper mills’ is one such manipulation.
Paper mills are profit oriented, unofficial and potentially illegal organisations that produce and sell fraudulent manuscripts that seem to resemble genuine research. They may also handle the administration of submitting the article to journals for review and sell authorship to researchers once the article is accepted for publication. Indications that manuscripts may be produced by a paper mill are more readily detected at scale as they may be similar in layout, experimental approach and have similar images or figures.
What are the issues associated with paper mills?
Publishers and editors are being alerted to many potentially problematic published articles that may indicate the involvement of alleged paper mills because they all contain possibly problematic research images (eg, Western blots and flow cytometry data).
Paper mills are difficult to spot until there is a bulk of published papers that can be compared, often across publishers.
Asking for raw data from the authors is a logical first step, but collecting and checking the data is not straightforward. This is especially the case if data files require specialist software and the raw data may not seem obviously problematic when assessed in isolation on a case-by-case basis.
在检测使用“股票图像”时存在困难，因为它们没有明显的操纵本身，并且可以提供数据。该问题仅在多个发布的论文中显而易见。
Correspondence can be difficult because it is unclear if approaching real authors or paper mill agents.
当不清楚谁接近谁或缺乏反应时，即将到来的机构可能是困难的。
Questions for discussion
出版商和编辑可以根据具体情况处理个别文件，我们如何解决比赛的更大问题？
What can publishers do to improve the screening processes to detect these problems earlier?
Are there key author declarations that could be suggested that researchers make?
Even for journals which do not have a mandatory data sharing policy, should authors be asked to store their original data/images in open or institutional repositories so that data are at least available on request?
Can COPE play an active role?
Guest speaker
This topic was discussed at the start of the COPE Forum on Friday 4 September 2020, with guest speaker Elisabeth Bik (Microbiome and Science Integrity Consultant).
Elizabeth Bik, is a Dutch microbiologist living in California who has worked for 15 years at Stanford University and two years in industry before becoming a science integrity volunteer and consultant in 2019. Her work with her team in scanning the biomedical literature for images and other data concerns has been instrumental in detecting paper mill activity.
Paper Mills are becoming a real problem. There are likely thousands of these papers and our team has reported on only a couple of hundred so far.
它们由商业实体生成 - 一个可能与真实实验室相关的公司。
产品都是卖给那些需要t了一篇论文heir resume or promotion. These papers usually contain fabricated data, although they might include real photos of cells or tissues or other microscopy photos. The companies are difficult to find online and they are usually run under the guise of language editing services for non-native English speakers. Behind the scenes, they might offer more services, such as selling papers to authors who need them for their promotion or to finish medical school, for example.
这对中国医院的医生来说是一个特殊的问题，因为他们有要求将纸张出版以完成医学院或获得促销活动，这意味着他们将获得更多的资金。通常，这些医生是未付的，并支持他们的家庭，他们需要促销，从而需要发布一个科学论文，尽管他们可能没有兴趣进行研究。尽管需要这一要求，但他们没有从繁忙的诊所时间表中休息时间进行研究，他们通常在医院没有工作的研究设施。然而，他们应该写一篇研究论文。因此，当企业提供给他们的作者以回报造成金钱，他们通常认为这是一个谋生的小投资。
我们致力于通过筛选其中许多来识别这些论文。他们很难认识，因为它们看起来像真正的论文，没有明确的红旗。但是，如果您查看广泛的数据集，则某些模式开始出现：论文通常是关于非编码RNA（微RNA或圆形RNA）;它们通常在癌症领域;他们经常有私人或非机构电子邮件地址的作者;它们通常具有特定的照片和类型的实验。
Journals can ask the authors for the raw data but often the raw data are also manipulated. Or the raw data might be, for example, a flow cytometry file, which is hard to recognise and difficult to read if you are not a flow cytometry expert.
一个解决方案是，期刊可以在其稿件提交过程中包含一个复选框，以便作者确认他们在自己的实验室内生成所有数据。这可能无法防止造纸厂，但它可能会使其他制作数据的公司更加困难，以后提出这些问题。
There are many red flags: papers from Chinese hospitals because of their requirement to have a research paper published; papers about small non-coding RNAs and cancer; papers containing very particular types of experiments, such as western blots, flow cytometry and microscopy; papers seeming to follow a particular title structure; and non- institutional e-mail addresses, an email address that does not appear to be linked to any of the names of the authors or an e-mail address that ends with 123. Individually, these factors may not be problematic but taken together they raise concerns and could be part of a pattern.
Comments from the Forum, Friday 4 September 2020
Note: Comments do not imply formal COPE advice, or consensus
- In our article submission system, we see strategic changes to the authorship list in papers that we suspect might be paper mills. It seems that they know the journal is going to ask them to confirm authorship changes and they make sure that there are enough of the original authors, at each stage, to make it seem legitimate. But sometimes the final paper has a completely new authorship list and affiliation list. We have had examples where the corresponding author name has changed, the affiliation has changed, but the e-mail addresses is the same. If we contact the authors, we are not sure if we are talking to the agents. The institutions are not responding to us.
- 如果对Autheration List有广泛的更改，我们要求作者提供机构投入。我们要求直接从研究所发送到日志的电子邮件。
- Using an ORCID ID and insisting on ORCID IDs to confirm identity can help. But people can create a new ORCID ID if necessary, and it does not deter them from submitting these papers.
- We are now making populated ORCID or an institutional email mandatory at our journal.
- 强制性机构地址的弊端是，它可能禁止就业，博士后和退休研究人员之间的人提交给期刊。
- How do paper mills differ from authorship by medical communication company? Both are ghost authorship.
- Our system triggers an email to all co-authors of a paper stating that they need to confirm authorship and send a contributor statement.
- Is it possible to make it mandatory for Chinese authors to provide an institutional email address? Can we insist that when researchers from institutions in China submit papers to international journals that they should have an institutional e-mail address? Collectively, can we work with Chinese institutions, explaining that if there is pressure on researchers to publish in international journals, then the institutions within these regions need to have the infrastructure in place to have legitimate verifiable email addresses in place so that journals can work with them.
- Could institutional review board approval be a point of reference to contact the institution and get reassurance that the studies were performed at the institutions?
- 造纸厂纸张通常具有肤浅的理由，用于进行其分析，通常是基因和基因功能。他们可以将基因，有时多种基因与人类疾病结合，这通常是一种癌症的形式。基因与疾病之间的联系通常是肤浅的。讨论部分也是肤浅的。一个红旗是不正确的核苷酸序列，并且通常在这些纸中描述的试剂是错误的。
- 许多这些论文没有资金。此外，在确认部分中，他们注意到有人会整理数据，但有些人没有提到谁执行了实验。
- 当我们调查重复提交的潜在问题时，我们经常会意识到这些论文。如果我们发现他们在其他地方发表，作者将要求提款或者不会接受联系。
- Paper mill activity has been largely in the life sciences portfolio but some has been found in engineering journals. We have seen paper mills in other disciplines such as computer sciences, engineering, humanities and social sciences. In civil engineering, we discovered some of the authors were medical doctors, and did not seem to have any degree in civil engineering and the institutes did not have any departments of civil engineering
- Scholar One offers a tool called “unusual activity detector”, an algorithm that picks up submissions from the same computer. This is not necessarily a sign of a paper mill submission but if there are other red flags, it can be useful. Some additional features have been added. The original features for the tool were to protect against reviewer fraud and a report would only be issued after peer review. A new setting (low, medium, high) can raise an alert if there is a high rate of submission from the same device. Would it be useful to approach Clarivate to get more details about these reports? Is it possible to see where the IP addresses come from and if they can be traced back to the paper mill?
- 我们已被Pub对等人报告对数字的问题提醒，例如Western Blots。然后，我们要求提交人的基础数据进行内部审查。我们收到的数据几乎总是不完整，并且没有完全匹配方法中描述的实验类型。给定实验说明，其他问题是可疑地缩小图表中的SD值。因此，问题可以超越巧妙的图像操纵。我们很幸运能够在我们的出版团队中拥有科学家，他们可以快速了解数据，并在首席上向编辑提出摘要和提案。这对我们有了很大帮助，酋长的编辑并不克服了这种情况。
- How can comparisons be done systematically across different articles in different journals?
- 它是如何不同于医疗通讯作者unication company (ie, ghost authorship)?
- If a submission looks suspicious, it may be worth looking into the metadata. Larger journals might notice 10 or 20 manuscripts that seem very similar in structure and title, submitted on the same day or within a few days. The documents properties might show that the revision number of the manuscript is very high. Also, the initials of the last person who made changes to the document may not match any of the authors. These issues do not confirm that this is a paper mill article but could raise suspicions that need a closer look at the authors, their institutes and whether its likely that the study would have come from that institute.
- 如果我们发现我们发表了一篇文章的文章，我们会遵循“如果您在发布的稿件中制作数据”的“该怎么办公例”的COPE流程。这是具有挑战性，因为我们往往无法与机构联系。我们斗争是否发布了一个关于关注或缩回纸张的编辑说明。
- Can we envisage approaches to retract published paper mill papers in batches?
- Without an admission from the authors, is it ever possible to prove a paper came from a paper mill?
还有更多bob app下载 posted on our website before the Forum discussion.
在本次讨论之后，应对修改我们的指导方针bob官方appsystematic manipulation of the publication process.
Related resource
Potential “paper mills” and what to do about them – a publisher’s perspective
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