Some years back I wrote about an authorship scam where papers that had already been accepted, but were still at the proof stage, were offered up to people who wanted to become “authors” on them for a fee. Yep, you could bulk up your publication list the easy way, with cash. That one was run out of China, and that country has been the source of hundreds, likely thousands, of such things (here’s an analysis by Elisabeth Bik). But you will probably not be surprised to hear that the same crap has persisted elsewhere. Retraction Watch has been on this story for years, as you could well imagine, and back in December they published this look at a Russian paper mill, “International Publisher LLC”.
This one’s particularly brazen – they post what are basically advertisements for open authorship slots, pointing out to customers that the fees will vary depending on where on the author list you want to appear and on the quality of the journal the paper is slated to appear in. Naturally. This outfit goes around soliciting for new listings as well, alerting actual authors to the chance to add a bit to their own income by including a total stranger or two. As you’ll see from that article, there’s always a list of a couple of hundred article possibilities for you to browse from, and turnover is constant. Here’s a new preprint examining the same people – it examines 1009 offers in the 2019-2021 period that have appeared (and then disappeared) on the site and finds at least 434 papers that have subsequently appeared in the literature that match up with these. (Here’s an article here at Science on this one). Actually, that should be 419 papers, because several of them appear to have been published twice, which sort of fits. The estimate is that these things have brought in over six million dollars during that period.
The Russian faked-authorship industry appears to have sprung up after changes that directly required publications – the more, the better – as a factor for promotion: