We have been approached via email by a company promoting authorship for sale. The email describes the service as providing 'coauthorship' of an existing article that has been submitted for publication in an indexed journal. The articles cover a range of disciplines and the company claims a high success rate for publication.
Question for COPE Council:
- What steps should publishers take in cases of such overt promotion of paper mills?
Advice on this case is from a small number of COPE Council Members. Most cases on the COPE website are presented to the COPE Forum where advice is offered by a wider group of COPE Members and COPE Council Members. Advice on individual cases is not formal COPE guidance.
Council noted that approaches like this are increasingly common, either targeted to the editorial office, or directed at editors in their capacity as researchers. Two courses of action were proposed. First, that journals follow COPE’s advice on paper mills (and supplementary advice here, where concerns are raised at scale) to deal with suspected cases. Second, that they collect examples of direct approaches from these organisations and share them centrally, for example, via the STM Integrity Hub. Titles of specific articles being offered for sale could also be extracted from the organisations’ websites and cross-checked for duplicate submission using tools like those being developed by STM. This would provide evidence which could lead to an industry response.
More broadly, the most constructive approach that editors can take is to promote awareness of these services and their role in publication fraud. It seems unlikely that action against individual services will be of much utility, even if it were possible, as more will surface rapidly. Young researchers in particular are often unaware of the status and intentions of these services, and may feel pressure to use them in order to publish. Editors could thus consider writing editorials about paper mills and other similar services to raise awareness, and including general warnings in their instructions for authors.