LAUSR

Scientific publication is one of the major measures of academic success. The prevalent culture of ‘publish or perish’ in academia has led to the growth of several unethical practices like plagiarism, authorship disputes, competing interests, data fabrication, redundant or salami publications, identity thefts, data sharing issues, and copyright breaches, to name a few. Paper mills are a recent addition to this list and refer to potentially illegal and shadowy organizations that sell fake scientific manuscripts or where one can buy authorship positions on template manuscripts. Since 2018, several such manuscripts have been identified and retracted across scientific disciplines. The Royal Society of Chemistry retracted 68 papers where authors were listed from Chinese Hospitals. Paper mills are believed to operate in several other countries. Since January 2020, more than 1000 publications have been found to originate from paper mills. Hundreds of these have been retracted, and several have been labeled with ‘expression of concern’ tags.