How paper mills go straight (without going clean): a shift to dual-use services

Guest post by Matt Spick Photo: Parsadanov/Shutterstock.comFrom relative obscurity, paper mills have recently moved into the spotlight of academic attention. These organisations - which sell manuscripts or citations to authors to enhance scholarly metrics - are growing so rapidly that many fields are being overwhelmed. The overall proportion of paper mill outputs was estimated at 1.5–2% of all scientific papers published in 2022, but a recent AI-screening cancer study estimated that around 10% of recent cancer manuscripts in some venues may be paper mill products, and in data-intensive fields paper mill outputs can now outnumber legitimate publications. The increased attention has also been driven by the integrity community highlighting unethical behaviours, notably in the FoSci Report 2026, and has resulted in initiatives such as United2Act. This is in addition to publishers and third parties setting up a growing number of integrity checking systems, whether for citation anomalies,…