China's Supreme Court Calls For Crack Down on Paper Mills (nature.com) 11
China's highest court has called for a crack down on the activities of paper mills, businesses that churn out fraudulent or poor-quality manuscripts and sell authorships. Nature: Some researchers are cautiously optimistic that the court's guidance will help curb the use of these services, while others think the impact will be minimal. "This is the first time the supreme court has issued guidance on paper mills and on scientific fraud," says Wang Fei, who studies research-integrity policy at Dalian University of Technology in China.
Paper mills sell suspect research and authorships to researchers who want journal articles to burnish their CVs. They are a significant contributor to overall research misconduct, particularly in China. Last month, the Supreme People's Court published a set of guiding opinions on technology innovation. Among the list of 25 articles, one called for lower courts to crack down on 'paper industry chains,' and for research fraud to be severely punished. Further reading:
Research Reveals Data on Which Institutions Are Retraction Hotspots;
Paper Mills Have Flooded Science With 400,000 Fake Studies, Experts Warn.
Paper mills sell suspect research and authorships to researchers who want journal articles to burnish their CVs. They are a significant contributor to overall research misconduct, particularly in China. Last month, the Supreme People's Court published a set of guiding opinions on technology innovation. Among the list of 25 articles, one called for lower courts to crack down on 'paper industry chains,' and for research fraud to be severely punished. Further reading:
Research Reveals Data on Which Institutions Are Retraction Hotspots;
Paper Mills Have Flooded Science With 400,000 Fake Studies, Experts Warn.
Why is this a problem? (Score:5, Interesting)
businesses that churn out fraudulent or poor-quality manuscripts and sell authorships
As opposed to researchers that churn out poor-quality manuscripts?
The whole point of peer-review is that only decent quality manuscripts will be accepted. And you will get a reputation soon enough if you keep submitting garbage.
It would be better to go after pay-for-play publishing venues. We have had a couple of faculty applicants who got pretty far in the hiring process until we realized what kind of publications they had on the CV.
Good to know (Score:2)
Someone is asking the right question. Let's hope more do so.
Both [Re:Why is this a problem?] (Score:4, Interesting)
It would be better to go after pay-for-play publishing venues.
Not mutually exclusive. You can do both: go after pay-for-play publishing venues, and shut down paper mills.
For reference, the original list of predatory ("pay for play") publishers was Beal's list, which had been under legal attack by some of the predatory journals listed. It's now being kept up by an anonymous coordinator: https://beallslist.net/ [beallslist.net]
There are more sites keeping such lists now:
https://guides.lib.odu.edu/pub... [odu.edu]
https://www.predatoryjournals.... [predatoryjournals.org]
Re: (Score:3)
go after pay-for-play publishing venues, and shut down paper mills.
I guess my question is -- are paper mills doing anything wrong?
There are more than a few researchers whose only contribution to published research is getting funding for the project. Is there a big difference between hiring a PostDoc to write papers or contracting a company?
Beal's list
Very good point -- thank you for mentioning it.
Re: (Score:3)
businesses that churn out fraudulent or poor-quality manuscripts and sell authorships
As opposed to researchers that churn out poor-quality manuscripts?
You can only go after the shoddy researchers that churn out poor-quality manuscripts one at a time. The industrial-scale "paper mills" turn them out by the thousand.
Also, the paper mills make papers that are clearly fraud: the "researchers" they sell their work to did not do the work.
For merely "poor-quality manuscripts", it's much harder to prove fraud. About the best you can do is, when one applies for a job, look at some of the publications and say "this is poor quality work" and not offer them a job.
Re: (Score:3)
In general it is a problem. This forces the rest of the community to have better/smarter filters, which is a waste of time. Now, I don't think it is a supreme court type of problem to solve.
The problem with relying on peer review is that predatory venues paint themselves as being peer reviewed, which is typically not true or not rigorous. And when you are not from the precise field, it can sometimes be hard to tell whether a venue is legit or not.
In CS, we moved almost exclusively to conferences and I find
Re: (Score:2)
In CS, we moved almost exclusively to conferences and I find that I-core does a decent job at classifying conferences in tiers.
In addition to predatory journals, there are predatory conferences. And they work hard at looking, from the outside, just like real conferences. Slick web page presence, even sometimes big names as keynotes (delivered by video). So they invite all the fringe and sloppy researchers, charge them hefty fees for the privilege of presenting at a "conference" that turns out to be-- at best-- a rented hotel room with other bottom level "researchers". Or some of them are completely virtual; you get nothing but a
Re: (Score:3)
businesses that churn out fraudulent or poor-quality manuscripts and sell authorships
As opposed to researchers that churn out poor-quality manuscripts?
The whole point of peer-review is that only decent quality manuscripts will be accepted. And you will get a reputation soon enough if you keep submitting garbage.
It would be better to go after pay-for-play publishing venues. We have had a couple of faculty applicants who got pretty far in the hiring process until we realized what kind of publications they had on the CV.
This is an interesting question about why paper mills are a problem. In the ideal world, there should be two levels of validation for good papers. First, peer review should only accept good papers. Second, the organizations that consider publishing CVs should have sufficient expertise to understand what are good publishing venues (with good peer review).
In this particular case of a university considering faculty candidates, usually conferences and journals are tiered so that universally recognized top ve
Re: (Score:2)
If that is the case, the mystery remains as to why paper mills exist.
You answered that yourself in the assumption given in your first paragraph: "In the ideal world...".
We don't live in an ideal world.
All of these things that you list as features of "the ideal world" require large expenditures of time by top professionals. They can do all this, which they get basically no credit for... or they can do their own work.
Re: (Score:1)
Accepted by whom?
The issue they're on about, is that there are entire scientific-journal-publishing companies (dozens of them) that exist purely to support the academic world's thirst for getting half-baked papers accepted purely to advance careers.
The peer review system used by otherwise legitimate journals (even the big ones) does also break down sometimes and let something through that it shouldn't, but that's no