Dear Sleuths: Follow the Money

A paper making the rounds this week from PNAS claims to show that the growth rate of bogus scientific papers is accelerating faster than the growth rate of legitimate science, and that the players are tightly interconnected, suggesting a crime ring (to me, at least). I think they are correct. It’s a good paper.

And while a story in the New York Times interviews all the usual STM sleuths, Carl Zimmer and the sleuths are missing a major, normal sleuthing step:

Follow the money.

Why would someone want to flood the zone with bogus papers? What’s the incentive?

As the authors of the paper note toward the end:

Some of the organization we describe may be better characterized as “brokerages” than paper mills.

I think it’s money laundering, as I wrote about last year:

Money laundering involves taking funds earned through an illicit activity — selling drugs, illegal weapons, banned technology, etc. — and transacting them through a legitimate source you can still access, thereby laundering away the money’s dirty origin.

The countries involved are Russia and Iran mainly, both tightly controlled by various sanctions. What better way to launder money out of a monitored account and into a clean account than to funnel it through APCs and publication fees into accounts you control or which can be used by corrupt editors or publishers to transfer the money into such an account for you, with them taking a share as a convenience charge?

Nobody is talking about this, but what other incentive is there? Citations? Maybe, but that’s pretty weak tea, especially as more of them are going to be eliminated by Clarivate and others as we sniff out the scientific integrity issues.

I think the motivation is money, and the APC has given players a great way to launder it.

In 2024, an Australian news article covering Wiley’s woes wrote:

. . . the UK Research Integrity Office recently described the [research integrity] problem as vast: “These are organised crime rings that are committing large-scale fraud.”

The mills, principally operating from China, India, Iran, Russia, and other post-Soviet states, have even been planting stooges in editors’ chairs at certain journals and paying bribes to others to ensure fake papers are published.

Around the same time, coverage of a Research Watch investigation in Science noted:

At least tens of millions of dollars flow to the paper mill industry each year, estimates Matt Hodgkinson of the independent charity UK Research Integrity Office. . . . So cash-rich paper mills have evidently adopted a new tactic: bribing editors and planting their own agents on editorial boards to ensure publication of their manuscripts.

Where is all this money coming from? And why are nation-states known for sketchy activities the ones mainly involved?

We have blind spots that can be exploited. OA enthusiasm gave a Russian PsyOps and phishing operation carte blanche for years as various administrators and advocates embraced Sci-Hub, only to find it was simply a front for hackers. Now, our same obeisance to “open” may be allowing money launderers to use scientific publishing to wash their dirty money.

What if all the hand-wringing over paper mills is about research integrity and so forth, while the bandits are happily laundering money through crypto, traditional account laundering, and more?

That’s what I think is going on.

Sleuths, get on it. We need to check it out.