Paper Mills and Broken Publishing Incentives (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Hey, Professor Suckler here. Today, I'm reacting to an investigation of paper mills. This is junk science being produced for pay. We're going to see how it works and even a call from the journalist with some of these scammers. I'm going to also share with you some of the scam emails I've gotten from editors myself and cover what this means for you as a researcher, what you need to watch out for and how we're going to go about fixing this broken publishing system. So let's dive in.

[00:00:25] Speaker 2: It's an industrialized effort to mass produce low quality research for profit.

[00:00:30] Speaker 3: The entities behind that industrialized effort have become known as paper mills. They're sketchy businesses that make and sell fraudulent research papers and get them published in real journals. And the fraudulent papers they produce are becoming a bigger and bigger portion of all.

[00:00:47] Speaker 1: This graph is deeply troubling. I want to go back to this proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper, because, yes, there's been a huge rise in scientific articles overall. But notice something important here. This is on a log scale, right? So this is exponential. This graph isn't even fully doing justice to the rapid rise of these paper mill products.

[00:01:12] Speaker 3: Scientific literature growing at a rate that is outpacing that of legitimate science and making the paper mill industry tens of millions of dollars every year.

[00:01:21] Speaker 1: So what we're going to come to in a second is how journals profit off publication fees. It's something that I cover in another video. If you want to check out here on how the publishing system is broken, this paper mill problem is a symptom of these perverse and flawed incentives. And those flawed incentives, as this video is going to cover, has to do with this publisher parish culture.

[00:01:43] Speaker 3: Academics to publish papers in order to advance in their career. Since universities want faculty to increase the institution's profile, they often incentivize publishing research by rewarding it with funding, promotions or even cash bonus.

[00:01:58] Speaker 1: This is 100% true. I often say publication is like money in the bank because it is your currency as an academic. Now, that's not just quantity of papers. Quality matters. And getting into top journals where there are strict gatekeepers trying to keep you out matters a lot. But but still, this point is really true. And I did a quick poll on my channel asking you, my audience, what is the publication worth to you? And over half said it's over $5,000 a paper or you couldn't even put a price on it. That was truly priceless, priceless, reflecting the transformational experience to get there. That's very different from what these paper mills are doing, let me say. But let's keep going.

[00:02:39] Speaker 3: But those expectations sometimes fall on staff who don't have time to do research or staff who aren't even researchers at all.

[00:02:45] Speaker 4: Those people may feel as if it's the only way that they can meet their employer's expectations is by engaging the services of someone who will help them.

[00:02:57] Speaker 1: So I see a lot of researchers coming to me saying, I need a paper published in one to two weeks, or they mistakenly think that Fast Track is a journal and that somehow we will court these junk papers and publish them. But this is basically a result of a system that's putting heavy pressure on one end to produce more and often squeezing faculty by putting more admin and teaching burdens, giving them less time overall to produce. And this is deeply troubling. So what I want to go to, though, is where this guy dives into the scams. But before I do that, I actually want to share with you a message I received just the other day from a journal editor. I've anonymized this. I propose establishing a formal collaboration based on my journal. I won't mention the name here, but it sounds quite plausible and looks legit. It says, as an editor in chief, I can offer a reliable and structured publication pathway for the authors you work with. We could agree on a referral partnership. You recommend qualified authors and submissions. In return, you receive an agreed commission after each article is successfully published. This collaboration will be transparent, professional. And this is a funny way to try to say it's ethical and mutually beneficial. Ensuring quality publications while expanding our academic network.

[00:04:12] Speaker 3: This is deeply troubling.

[00:04:13] Speaker 1: And I suspect this is what's going on behind the scenes to smooth the publication process of these paper mills who are not only taking money from the authors, but they're probably also getting a cut back from a lot of the fraudulent scam journals. But I warn researchers about who I work with because they're getting increasingly more difficult to detect.

[00:04:37] Speaker 3: Hi, can you hear me? Okay. Hi, I'm sorry. I missed your call earlier.

[00:04:42] Speaker 5: That's okay. So you've been trying to speak to me for the longest year.

[00:04:45] Speaker 3: Yes. I just, I, I've never kind of engaged with this sort of service before. So I just want to understand a little bit more about how it all, how this works.

[00:04:58] Speaker 6: Okay. So you want a paper written for you, right?

[00:05:01] Speaker 1: Correct. By the way, hats off to this journalist. I'm so happy. Christophe, I guess I just want to thank you for making this video. This is just tremendously important for the field of science that we have real investigative journalism going into this. So again, thank you. Okay. That's okay.

[00:05:20] Speaker 5: Hey, Nick, you got something for me? Sure.

[00:05:24] Speaker 3: I'm sorry. Can you say that again?

[00:05:26] Speaker 5: Is that correct? Right?

[00:05:30] Speaker 1: Yes. To get a paper written. That's correct.

[00:05:33] Speaker 3: And how, I guess, is, is anyone going to know kind of on the journal side? I just want to understand what is the journal?

[00:05:44] Speaker 5: Do you mean if there's a connection with the journal, is that what you're trying to ask?

[00:05:48] Speaker 3: Yes.

[00:05:49] Speaker 5: Hello?

[00:05:50] Speaker 3: Yeah, that, that's what I'm asking.

[00:05:51] Speaker 5: Yeah, sure. There's a very good connection. So with the reviewers, so it's going to be a, a smooth process. There's a connection with the reviewers.

[00:05:59] Speaker 3: Okay. So there's a guarantee. Okay, great.

[00:06:05] Speaker 5: The writing process, it's handled by the experts. So after writing the.

[00:06:10] Speaker 1: So the, this is interesting. So this paper mill is even beyond a different kind of scam than what I was showing a moment ago. This is, there's a tradition of ghostwriting where you might pay somebody, this happens with pharmaceutical companies, to write the article for you. But this is different. They're just writing, it looks like, from scratch. So they're not, they're not, they're not, they're not, they're not, they're not, they're not, they're not, they're not, they're not, they're not, they're not, they're not, they're not, they're not, they're not, an article and then taking it all the way through.

[00:06:32] Speaker 5: So submit the paper, the paper is going to be submitted using your details. After that, the manuscript is handed over to the editor. That's the person who have a link with over there, a member of the board. Um, then you are going to be notified when the submission is successful. All reviews you would receive would be minor. There will be no major review. Trust me, given the fact that it's all minor review, the paper will pass. And, um, I mean.

[00:06:56] Speaker 1: Okay. So it sounds like there's part of writing, but also they could just take your paper and somehow get it through, which is also troubling.

[00:07:03] Speaker 5: You get acceptance in little to no time. And once we get that, we proceed.

[00:07:10] Speaker 3: I guess I just wanted to know, do you have kind of previous examples that you can show me that you have done, uh, just sort of the track record to know that this works?

[00:07:23] Speaker 1: Also a reputable journal is not going to be able, you'll, you'll see the time from submission and the time to publication is actually listed on papers. So if a paper is churning around that quickly, I mean, in theory, they can fudge that data, but reputable journal shouldn't be able to. There's some exceptions where you have a very fast track process for urgent medical papers, but they publish the stats, a reputable journal on their average time to decisions, average time of peer review. So if you see something that's submitted and then published in a week, raises some eyebrows.

[00:07:56] Speaker 3: That would be great. In terms of sort of the, the substance of the paper, the science itself is that kind of.

[00:08:08] Speaker 1: Ironic he cut out right away, just got into the integrity of the science, but, uh, let's keep going.

[00:08:15] Speaker 3: Let's look that up on Google scholar. Wow.

[00:08:21] Speaker 1: Okay. So this is one of the papers that I sent as an example of a study that they did examining the role of radiation risk perception. I want to look that up myself right quick. It's Elsevier though. Elsevier, that's bizarre because Elsevier, you could put a little more trust in, in terms of not being scam journals. Let me look at that, uh, examining the role of radiation risk perception. If that's true, if this is true, we don't know if that is actually a paper that was done by a paper mill. This is a problem is you can see kind of red flag indicators, but you can't prove it easily. But somebody should investigate this specific paper, examining the role, the role of radiation risk perception. Let me just go look and see if I can get the details of this actual paper. It should be, if it was published and they paid for it, it should be open access. So anybody should be able to download this. Let's see if that's the case. So, so I don't, it's not open access. That's interesting. So there wasn't an open access fee paid. So I don't know where that would come from. My suspicion here is they're just lying. I don't think this was very hard to prove or to say, let's see here. Received January revised to a normal peer review process. Definitely not fast, but the peer review process was pretty smooth. You can see this went through one round of revision. The authors tidied this up in 10 days and then it got published and version of record was June 25. So it looks like they did have whatever they did, a very light peer review process. I would say only in about 10 to 20% of my papers, do I get this revision, submit them, and it doesn't go back to reviewers, the editors just accept it. So that is a little bit of a, of a red flag, but it's not that fast acceptance process. They were talking about, and I don't see where the open access fee is in this. So they might've gone through a subscription model here. And in this case, the journal's not making money off of this. The journal is going to make money when there's the open access fee at play. This looks like it was a subscription model. So I think if it was a paper mill, it was just those scammers themselves in the paper mill got the profit on, on this one.

[00:10:24] Speaker 2: More convincing product. And in that kind of environment, suddenly the bad actors are able to massively outproduce the good actors, the good scientists.

[00:10:35] Speaker 3: These are five different papers looking at the relationship between infertility and something called body roundness index. They're all accepted by different journals over the course of a year. Here's six more looking at chronic kidney disease and oxidative balance score. And these are six different studies looking at cardiovascular health and periodontitis.

[00:10:53] Speaker 1: This is not necessarily bad. I mean, public health is close to my heart and I've definitely seen a lot of papers. The journalist, I think maybe goes a little bit off piece here. I can see how this looks problematic, but a lot of dissertations have been done from people using publicly available secondary data source and flipping out an outcome for another and replicating various analyses. As long as those analyses are done with integrity, I don't see this as necessarily a huge problem, but yet, yes, I mean, it can still be kind of low quality, low publishability, such as using our own publishability formula. What's the gap? What's the value added to the field? Well, there's probably not a big gap here. This whole, not a whole lot of value added to the field. So be surprised if these are getting into top, top journals like BMC medicine, for example, that's not a creme de la creme journal. So these on their own, there's going to be natural gatekeeping that happens from asking a low value question in the field. They're not going to be able to easily get into the top of the top journals here. So it's just to say publication dates for redundant publications. I don't know if I would necessarily go that far in making that claim, but it raises another problem that I think is accurate that he brings up later.

[00:12:06] Speaker 3: Very important papers. I set out to figure out if I can trust the studies that I find on the Internet. And by going down the paper mill rabbit hole, I became convinced that I couldn't. But talking to Ivan, I realized that paper mills don't necessarily produce impactful bad science. They just flood the scientific literature with junk.

[00:12:28] Speaker 1: I think this is the core point. We used to talk about papers being intellectual landfill, like they weren't even worth the tree that was cut down to produce them. That's back when there was more print copies of papers. But this is it. They're just flooding the literature with junk, just polluting the literature.

[00:12:45] Speaker 3: And that means, well, they'll never really be a problem for a casual reader like me, for actual experts, the people who are trying to read every new study that comes out in their area of expertise. They can be devastating.

[00:12:57] Speaker 4: When we have papers en masse saying, oh, look at look at that gene, that gene is going to cure liver cancer. No, no, no. Wait a minute. These two together could cure liver cancer or. Oh, no, no, no. These other three. You know, this is a tremendous destruction.

[00:13:15] Speaker 1: Cards on the table. I don't fully agree with that. I think as long as that science is produced with integrity, maybe it's not that high value added. Shouldn't get published in a very high value journal. That's fine. I think those top journals are still going to have an important role to curate and filter and select what's important. But this is where systematic reviews come in. That also plays another valuable role in science, as I've talked about in this video here, for dealing with reproducibility problems, for filtering out junk in science and helping to establish and set agendas. It's why I'm a big fan of systematic reviews, as it's one of our best weapons available in evidence based science to get rid of junk and set a clear agenda going forward and also to make healthy recommendations to the general public and policymakers about what is the real state of the science and in built into it, assess the quality of that science on which we can draw conclusions. That's why they form the basis of medical guidelines and life and death decisions. Just want to step back and just say thanks again to this guy, Christoph, for shining a light on this issue. It's tremendously important. And if you're out there, I'd love to chat about, get in touch with me. I've got my email below. I'd love to chat about some things we could do together that would enable you to engage with the science by collaborating with myself as a researcher that you might not be able to do on your own, especially with in this age of AI fueled slop that's coming out. But again, thanks for sending this out there, guys. If you want, by the way, a real publication guarantee where you're, we're not going to do it for you, but you will learn the research. You will learn the science. Click the link below. Let's see if we're a good fit to work together. Join one of our mentorship communities with over 200 researchers from around the world, all working to help each other be the best researcher they can be in this day and age where the science is increasingly filled with junk. See you guys in the next video.