'Paper mills' sell fake scientific authorship, corrupting research

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Paper mill activity has exploded in recent years, polluting the scientific ecosystem with falsified data and compromising medical research

Dr Reese Richardson’s phone constantly buzzes with notifications. The scientific research integrity specialist has been tracking shadowy organisations known as “paper mills”, which turn a profit by offering fraudulent academic authorship of scientific papers, IP registrations and other scholarly outputs.

For a fee, paper mills offer to list people as authors of scientific journal articles, often of falsified research that bypasses the peer review process.

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