The market for scientific authorship. What are ‘paper mills’?

An author line beneath a scientific article should certify two fairly simple things: that those listed as authors have made a substantial contribution to the work and that they are willing to accept a share of the responsibility for what is published. In contemporary science, however, that same byline also serves another purpose, as it is taken into account when assessing those seeking a post, competing for funding, aspiring to a promotion or needing to demonstrate that they are productive enough to remain within the system. Publications have thus become, together with their bibliometric indicators, the primary yardstick by which a scientific career is measured.

Whenever an indicator reaches a high value, the incentive to obtain it by separating it from the reality it is supposed to represent also increases. In the case of publications, this practice has now taken on an industrial scale. There are organisations that produce fake or recycled scientific articles, find them a publisher, and sell a place on the list of authors for a few hundred dollars. They are known as ‘paper mills’, and their end product is not simply poor-quality scientific work: it is a publication designed to allow someone to include research on their CV that they have never actually carried out.

On 6 September, the science desk at ERR, Estonia’s public broadcaster, set out to see just how difficult it would be to break into this market. The answer came within half an hour. Journalists at Novaator, in an investigation written by Johannes Peetsalu and edited by Jaan-Juhan Oidermaa, created a fictional IT specialist named John Robert Steezy, gathered the contact details of seven particularly active sellers on Facebook, and messaged them on WhatsApp explicitly asking whether it was possible to buy an article byline. Five replied within thirty minutes. During the same period, more than twenty offers arrived on the fictitious researcher’s phone, with prices ranging from two hundred to eight hundred dollars.

There was no need to frequent underground forums, know intermediaries or learn any jargon reserved for insiders. Sellers openly advertised their services in Facebook groups with names such as ‘Free Scopus publication and research help’, using posters generated by artificial intelligence and inviting potential customers to continue the conversation on WhatsApp. Behind the façade of editorial consultancy lay a standard commercial catalogue from which one could choose the journal, one’s position amongst the authors, turnaround times and price.

The most expensive offer received by ERR was for eight hundred dollars and concerned an article intended, according to the seller, for the Journal of Intelligent Decision Making and Information Science. Publication was promised within twenty days. This timeframe is incompatible with what is normally required for a rigorous editorial assessment, the search for reviewers, peer review, any revisions to the manuscript and subsequent editorial processing. At the other end of the price range, for two hundred dollars, the fake computer scientist was offered the opportunity to be listed as an author on an article in fisheries science – a field, of course, completely outside the area in which the supposed researcher was an expert.

Even the customer service department had reached a remarkable level of professionalism. One of the sales representatives spoke to the journalist on the telephone, explained the publication procedure and pricing system to him in English, and made it clear that he would only have to pay once the manuscript had been accepted by the journal. The scam was therefore presented with a guarantee that shifted a substantial portion of the commercial risk onto the sales representative. Within a few hours, all the conversations had reached the same stage: all it would have taken was an email for one of the manuscripts to be sent to a journal listing John Robert Steezy as one of the authors – a man who does not exist and who, naturally, had not produced a single piece of data contained in those papers. At that point, the editorial team halted the experiment. The salespeople continued to write for days.

The submitted manuscripts were plausible enough to pass at least a cursory reading. On closer inspection, however, they revealed nonsensical figures and bibliographical references inserted haphazardly – signs of a process primarily concerned with reproducing the formal appearance of a scientific article. This is precisely the commercial requirement of a ‘paper mill’: the text must not contain any discovery; it must merely appear to be a publishable piece for long enough to pass the available checks.

To achieve this, factories now have access to various sources of raw materials. Some of these can be generated using artificial intelligence systems. Another part comes directly from existing scientific literature. According to ERR’s findings, little-known works or those published in languages that reduce the likelihood of recognition are also selected; these are then automatically translated and modified in terms of wording, tables and figures to a sufficient extent to make it more difficult to identify plagiarism.

Lauri Laanisto, a tenure-track professor of macroecology at the Estonian University of Life Sciences, had the opportunity to observe the process at first hand. In the spring of 2026, he discovered that a research paper in which he had participated had been submitted to a journal, slightly altered, under another person’s name. The discovery was a stroke of luck: a few months earlier, Laanisto had presented those very same results, including the figures, at a conference in Poland attended by the editor-in-chief of the journal that would later receive the plagiarised manuscript. When the editor came across the new article, he recognised material he had already seen.

The process of altering the text was straightforward and, for that very reason, quite instructive. The title and wording of the text had been changed; an image that was originally in colour had been converted to black and white; the results and scientific structure remained those of the original study. The manuscript listed as its author a person affiliated with a Chinese university, of whom Laanisto was unable to find any trace either on the university’s website or in academic databases. Nor is it certain that whoever produced the forgery needed to proceed as far as publication. Laanisto observes that, in some evaluation systems, a PhD student or researcher facing a deadline may only need to demonstrate that they have submitted a manuscript to a journal. In that case, the submission receipt already constitutes the ‘product’ purchased.

There remains, then, the issue of the checks that are supposed to prevent such material from becoming scientific literature. Here too, the industry has developed appropriate solutions. One of the techniques described by ERR involves proposing non-existent reviewers to the journal, linking them to email addresses controlled by the very organisation that produced the manuscript; when the publisher sends the request for peer review, the text thus returns to the hands of those responsible for getting it published, who can then fabricate a favourable assessment under a false identity. There is also documented evidence of attempts to bribe editors and of operations capable of taking control of parts of the editorial process.

The scale of the phenomenon makes it difficult to dismiss it all as merely a colourful fringe of poor-quality scientific publishing. An analysis published in PNAS identified 29,956 articles suspected of originating from ‘paper mills’ and also present in OpenAlex. At the time of the analysis, 8,589 of these – 28.7 per cent – had been retracted. Based on the observed trend, the authors estimate that only about a quarter of these papers will ever be retracted and that only an even smaller fraction will end up in journals subsequently excluded from the main indexing systems. A large amount of presumably fraudulent material is therefore set to remain part of the accessible literature, where it can be found, cited and incorporated into subsequent works.

Here, the harm takes on a different nature. Anyone who buys authorship of an article gains an illegitimate advantage on their CV and competes with researchers who have genuinely produced their own work; once published, the purchased article simultaneously enters the knowledge base that other scientists use to formulate hypotheses, design experiments and synthesise available knowledge. If it relates to biomedical disciplines, it may end up in literature reviews and, through subsequent stages, even contribute to the development of clinical guidelines. A person’s falsified CV thus becomes a problem for the reliability of collective knowledge.

Laanisto points out that the buying and selling of bylines has been going on for at least twenty years. In the past, this could even involve genuine articles that had already passed an initial review and in which, prior to final publication, a place amongst the authors was sold. The new development documented by the Estonian experiment concerns the scale and ease of access: the customer no longer needs to be in the right network at the right time, as they can contact a seller directly on social media and, within minutes, receive a selection of articles that are already available.

The demand fuelling this trade also stems from the way in which many institutions have chosen to evaluate research. Laanisto uses a very simple comparison: for a politician, it is votes that count; for a researcher, it is publications. The comparison becomes particularly apt when the number of papers is a direct factor in the conditions for securing a post, retaining it or receiving funding. In some countries, there are even cash rewards linked to publications; according to Laanisto, it is chiefly in contexts of this kind that ‘paper mills’ have so far found the most favourable ground, whilst he is not aware of any cases of Estonian researchers having made use of them.

However, it would be too simplistic to attribute the entire phenomenon to the pressure of ‘publish or perish’. That pressure creates demand, whilst for an industry to emerge, there must be a reasonable likelihood that the purchase will be successful. Paper mills can thrive because a publication retains high value as a certificate of productivity even when the mechanisms that should guarantee who produced it and how it was produced become compromised. Quantitative assessment, insufficient editorial checks and the lack of consequences following discovery thus end up assigning a market price to something that the scientific system continues to treat as proof of merit.

At present, anyone found to have purchased an article, duplicated data or published material stolen from other researchers may face local consequences without necessarily incurring a sanction that would follow them throughout the academic system. A formal exclusion from access to public funding, however, would alter the risk assessment. At present, that calculation can be remarkably favourable: a few hundred dollars for an extra publication, an uncertain likelihood of being discovered, and consequences that may remain limited even when the fraud comes to light.

ERR’s experiment, very similar to one I carried out myself about 10 years ago, highlights above all just how commonplace this market has become. Seven telephone numbers found on Facebook, five replies in half an hour, more than twenty articles to choose from, two hundred dollars to take on a role as an IT specialist in a fisheries project, eight hundred for a promise of publication within twenty days. Behind these figures lies a business that now understands academic demand, tailors its services to the metrics used to evaluate researchers, and supports the client right through to the acceptance of the manuscript. When buying documentary evidence of having conducted scientific research becomes easier than actually carrying out the research required to produce it, the problem no longer concerns only those who cheat, but the value we are still willing to attribute to that evidence. When will we put an end to bibliometrics?