Speaker 1: An organised crime ring is selling academic influence to the highest bidder. And our story starts in Cambridge. This is a standard office in Cambridge, near the river, with plush, lovely decoration and furniture. And in comes Nick Wise. This is Nick Wise, who is a researcher, I think, in fluid dynamics at Cambridge. And he's just had a really hard day in the lab. And he's like, you know what really, really makes me happy? But I'll kiss the president of the college there. There we are. And you know what makes me really, really happy? Is going on Facebook. So I'll get out my laptop and I'll go on old Faceybee and check on what all of my friends are doing. But while I'm here, I'm going to do what I really love, which is look for fraudulent academic articles. So here we are. I'm going to go on all of the Facebook groups where people are selling influence. And there's just normal stuff. Look at this. Here, he finds it's just normal. On Facebook groups, there are people selling the ability to put your name on academic papers. And this isn't anything new, but there's a surprise in store for old Nick Wise. But first of all, watch out, there's a Cambridge rowing team. OK, they're gone. It's not just the normal put your name here for money. There's something much deeper and darker going on. There's this guy, Jack Ben. Jack Ben's on Facebook groups and he's saying, hey, guys, I've got money for you. I've got loads and loads of money. And I'm saying, I'm sure you'll make money from us, because what I'm offering you is a bag load of money for you to become an editor in our control. Essentially, we're going to give you papers that you're just going to accept because I work for an academic publishing group and I sell peer-reviewed papers to people. And all these people are like, yes, I'm an academic editor. I can definitely do what you want. Just give me loads of money. And old Nick Wise boy here says, hang on, this isn't right. I'm going to report this. But the question is, why now? Is Jack Ben on Facebook groups offering loads of money? Well, it comes down to a paper mill. In a paper mill, here it is. Look at all these papers ready to be sent to academic journals fraudulently. In a paper mill, typically, in the past, you've had this. A load and load of papers being generated. Type, type, type, type, type, type, type, type, type. And we'd have loads and loads of them being produced over and over again. And we would flood these for money. People would pay to get their names on our articles. And this would mean that they would become big meta-academics. But the problem is, is recently, there's a load of AI tools that have been put in a stop to that horrible, horrible practice. They've been scanning these papers and saying, no, these are no good. So what do we have to do? Well, old Jack Ben here from Olive Academic is saying, well, we can't get past AI anymore, guys. But what we can do is just pay journal editors loads and loads of money just to blindly accept our papers when we submit them. So on the editorial board of papers, he just needs to put a few people that are willing to take bribes. And this isn't just a small amount of money, by the way. This is many thousands of dollars for one paper that was published three days previously. They found out that it was $840 direct into their bank account. And one guy has been paid up to $16,300 for just accepting papers. These are academics that clearly greed has got the better to them. But this isn't the only way they're doing it. Not only are they putting people on editorial boards, but here you've got the guest editor. A guest editor is approached by a journal. And they're asked, hey, can you put together a little collection of papers in your field that you think would be really good? But the problem is this guest editor is very rarely checked for proper credentials and the fact they've actually got a PhD. So this is a real weak point in the editorial board because this young academic will see the money and say, yeah, give me all that money. I'll just put your weird paper in my guest editorial blog. And this all came to light because when we were on Facebook, old Nick Wise realized, old Nick Wise, here he is. Hello, I'm Nick Wise. He saw that Jack Ben hadn't properly blurred out some of the names of the editors and he hadn't blurred out the names of the papers of the examples that he was talking about. This is one of them. The influencing factors of gastrointestinal blah, blah, blah. But since this came to light, they were able to contact the editors of this journal. And you can see it's been retracted because of all of these. But we all know that it's this peer review manipulation. And I think this is one of the biggest issues facing academic credibility right now. Here is a graph of all the total retractions over time. And you can see that it's spiked in the last few years in terms of rogue editors just accepting anything because of the cold, hard cash. And we've also got paper mills increasing as well as peer review manipulation, which is just as what's going on and being reported in this latest article. But what does this mean? What are the root causes? I think there are three root causes. The first one is publisher profits. Now, journals are very quick to point out, oh no, no, no, this is just a few bad apples, which is true. But let's not forget that these journals rely on people publishing in their journals to get money. They charge open access fees. They charge publication fees. And so it is not in their best interest to properly vet all these things because they'd run out a lot of money. I think we would be naive to think that they don't get a lot of their money from this sort of paper mill activity. So they're not actually incentivized in a business way for stopping this at the root cause. The second thing that's driving this is academic credibility based on metrics, the H index. If all of a sudden we just stopped using H index, citation indices for measuring the success of an academic, this would stop almost immediately. The third thing is that this relies on good academics getting through all of the rubbish, rejecting all of the rubbish paper mill papers at the expense of their own research. Academics actually sort of like join a journal editorial board for free because it's part of that like academic credibility and prestige. The problem is once they're on the academic board, there is so much work that goes into getting through all of these papers, dismissing the stuff that one person said that it really add in to all of his ability to do real good science. And that means all of the good people are gonna be kicked out because they realize it's just not worth their time. It's not worth trying to fix the mistakes of the past and not having the help and support required to get rid of all of these paper mill submissions. Now I have no idea how to tackle this other than those three things. So let me know in the comments what you would change about the academic process so that we can get away and stop incentivizing these companies to produce these paper mill papers and therefore pass profits onto the publishers. It just seems like the publishers have got too much power, but let me know in the comments what you think. And if you like this video, go check out this one where I talk about the academic fraud epidemic that's happening right now. It will shock you, go check it out. Thank you.