Table 2.

Rendezvous with a paper mill—a true story

An unsolicited email from a paper mill to an SCI journal editor, and the following exchange (January-April 2022). The editor followed up the contact per email and recorded a Zoom meeting to detail the fraudulent business model, including evidence of corruption. Paper Mill We are a well-known academic support institution from Guangzhou, China, which has been established for 8 years. Experts in our institution need to publish some research papers in SCI journals every month. For reducing the publication time, we expect to cooperate with you in the future. Cooperation mode: we cite the content of your journal in our articles, thus increasing … your i in 2022. You shall help us shorten the publication time. Payment: If an article is successfully published, we will pay for it at the price: IF*1,000 USD/article. For example, with IF = 2.36, total payment = 2.36*1,000 USD = 2,360USD. And this price is negotiable What you can get: 1. An increased journal impact factor in 2022 2. Desirable payment we give Editor [Journals] are always happy to receive manuscripts for publication and always welcome suggestions of how to increase paper flow. …I have a few questions … so that I can better understand what to expect: 1. How many scientists/publications have you supported and in which fields do you have experience? How about the field of medicine, especially neurology? 2. How can I be sure that the quality of the manuscripts is good enough for our journal? Do you have foreign native speakers who check the language thoroughly? 3. How many manuscripts can I count on receiving from you per month? Is the number large enough to reach a noticeable growth of my journal in a relatively short period of time? 4. You mentioned a method to increase the impact factor. Can you explain how that works and what impact factor growth you can accomplish….? ….We are currently at around IF 2. How long would it take … to reach IF 5 or 6…? Paper Mill 1. We have supported the publication of thousands of articles. We mainly have experience in biomedical fields, such as molecular biology, pharmacy, and tumor-related research 2. We have people from native English-speaking countries to polish the manuscript and experts with biomedical background to review the content. We will arrange 3–4 colleagues to work with you 3. We have more than 100 manuscripts every month. … 4. We are very familiar with a series of ethical norms of academic publishing, and we also know that the influencing factors of a magazine are related to the number of manuscripts published and the number of times articles are cited by other scholars. Therefore, we will vigorously publicize and recommend the articles of the magazine to Chinese academics on our own publicity platform. Get maximum exposure. … Editor 1. We are planning a special issue on “Neuromodulation… for neurorehabilitation.” We are wondering if you are able to send us 8–12 manuscripts on the topic within the next 4–6 weeks … 2. These days it is sometimes difficult to find qualified reviewers that are familiar with this field. Therefore, for each paper, would you be able to suggest at least 3 independent researchers knowledgeable in this field … willing to review the manuscript? … 3. To estimate the growth potential of any collaboration: How many full-time employees does your agency employ? And do you have any access to freelancers, and if so, from which countries (language)? 4. Do you have any unique advantage over other agencies that have similar offers? 5. In order to evaluate the quality of your service, could you please send us … references of SCI-papers … you have helped to get published in the field of medicine? Paper mill 1. We have our own molecular biology laboratory and have developed extensive cooperation with many universities in China. Therefore, we think we can send sufficient manuscripts on this topic 2. First, we have colleagues who have worked at MDPI, AME Publishing Company, Hindawi, and so on, and they are responsible for suggesting qualified reviewers. Second, our company has many alumni from Sun Yat-sen University and the University of Hong Kong, and they will review our manuscripts more friendly [sic] 3. Our company currently has 100 full-time employees and more than 300 freelancers from the United States, Canada, Italy, Israel, Pakistan, Turkey, India, China and other countries 4. Our advantage lies in the stable customer source, as well as the mature and efficient management system 5. Here are the DOIs: …

Unexpectedly, the paper mill was willing to provide a DOI-list and PDFs of 98 of its publications, 96 of which were red-flagged by our indicators as fake