Leiden University in the Netherlands has partnered with American scientific publisher Wiley to offer a PhD scholarship to a student interested in investigating the workings of paper mills—services that sell fake scientific articles. According to Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner, a researcher at the Dutch institution’s Center for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), the four-year doctoral research will provide a deeper conceptual understanding of these services, which have flourished in recent years, particularly among authors from certain countries, such as China, India, and Russia—but have compromised the integrity of the scientific literature worldwide.
The aim is for the PhD student to analyze how paper mills operate and how their business models are associated with the publishing culture in different countries. As well as producing articles based on false data in return for a fee, some also sell authorship of papers that have already been accepted for publication, and in some cases they even manipulate the peer-review process to ensure a manuscript is accepted for publication.
One of the objectives of the new initiative is to generate data that can help improve the screening of papers submitted to journals and to make recommendations on how to address the problem for publishers and science policymakers. “There will certainly be some kind of practical relevance of the research,” Kaltenbrunner told the Retraction Watch website. He stressed that the research position will not result in the publication of a list of fraudulent services or the people that use them. “This wouldn’t be particularly effective, since the landscape of paper mills is constantly in flux,” he said. If the PhD student is threatened or faces legal proceedings associated with the research, the university will defend them.
Wiley will not take part in selecting the student or supervising them, nor can it influence or veto the publication of the research results, but it will work with the Leiden team to establish the parameters of the project. The company has had to deal with a large number of fraudulent articles sold by paper mills since its 2021 acquisition of the publisher Hindawi—subsequent analyses of its journals led to the retraction of thousands of scientific works. The scholarship recipient will be given access to confidential data on Wiley publications and submissions, but they will not focus exclusively on the company, according to Mike Streeter, director of research integrity, strategy, and policy at the publisher.
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