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.
Richardson has joined dozens of groups across apps such as Telegram, WhatsApp and Facebook where a buffet of fraudulent and fabricated research is advertised to hundreds of members. “I can just look through my notifications and I can see that I’ve gotten, like, 20 WhatsApp messages from paper mills in the last 24 hours,” he says.
Scientists are under constant pressure to publish new research papers which, in many parts of the world, remain the currency of academia. They beget more grant funding and accolades, and enhance academic profiles. But robust, high-quality science takes time, and papers can take years to get published.
Paper mills offer a fraudulent shortcut, using instant messaging and social media platforms to find prospective buyers looking for papers and patents to stack their CVs. According to an analysis Richardson conducted with Anna Abalkina and Spencer Hong, the median price to buy authorship is around US$800 (A$1,150).
In a recent paper, which has not yet been peer reviewed, the trio of scientists led by Richardson, formerly at Northwestern University in the US, detailed more than 18,000 advertisements from seven paper mills across seven countries between 2020 and 2026.
“We wanted to get an idea, across a wide range of paper mills, countries, topics and product types how much these things actually go for,” he says. “What we put together is the largest ever dataset of paper mill advertisements.”
They found many groups advertising authorship of scientific manuscripts across Telegram, Facebook and various websites for as little as US$30.
In the last 15 years, paper mill activity has exploded, with one estimate produced by Richardson in 2025 suggesting their products have been doubling approximately every 18 months. The journal articles produced by these paper mills typically bypass the accepted scientific editorial process of peer review, either because the journals do not institute those processes or because editors are themselves part of paper mill activities.
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This amounts to an industrialised injection of falsified data, polluting the scientific ecosystem and compromising medical research, drug discovery and clinical trials. The scale is massive: in 2023, Hindawi, a now defunct journal brand owned by major publisher Wiley, retracted more than 8,000 articles. A further 3,000 retractions came by the end of 2024.
Richardson says his research is a useful starting point for trying to grapple with how and where paper mills operate, and who they target. The advertisements are like fingerprints at a crime scene, potential evidence of malicious activity. “You can get a lot of information from the advertisements,” he says. He has directly tracked some of these to fraudulent papers in the scientific literature.
Other advertisements relate to copyrights and design registrations, another area ripe for fraud, which may provide buyers with legitimate intellectual property rights. Richardson notes one of the reasons to do this is to bolster resumes in service of academic advancement.
Richardson has previously identified exploitation of IP systems in the UK, finding thousands of design registrations. His new work identifies 12 instances where design registrations were advertised by a paper mill operating in India and catering to Indian academics.