Academic authorship for sale

 Here's a news story in Nature:

Multimillion-dollar trade in paper authorships alarms publishers. Journals have begun retracting publications with suspicious links to sites trading in author positions.  by Holly Else

"Research-integrity sleuths have uncovered hundreds of online advertisements that offer the chance to buy authorship on research papers to be published in reputable journals.

"Publishers are investigating the claims, and have retracted dozens of articles over suspicions that people have paid to be named as authors, despite not participating in the research. Integrity specialists warn that the problem is growing, and say that other retractions are likely to follow.

...

"Most of the adverts are posted on social-media sites including Facebook and Telegram, as well as the websites of companies that claim to offer academic publishing services. They often include the title of the paper, the journal it will be published in, the year of publication and the position of authorship slots available for purchase. Prices range from hundreds to thousands of US dollars depending on the research area and the journal’s prestige."

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Here is the underlying working paper, on arxiv,  to which the story refers:

Publication and collaboration anomalies in academic papers originating from a paper mill: evidence from a Russia-based paper mill  by Anna Abalkina

This study attempts to detect papers originating from the Russia-based paper mill International publisher LLC. A total of 1009 offers published during 2019-2021 on the this http URL website were analysed. The study allowed us to identify at least 434 papers that are potentially linked to the paper mill including one preprint, a duplication paper and 15 republications of papers erroneously published in hijacked journals. Evidence of suspicious provenance from the paper mill is provided: matches in title, number of coauthorship slots, year of publication, country of the journal, country of a coauthorship slot and similarities of abstracts. These problematic papers are coauthored by scholars associated with at least 39 countries and submitted both to predatory and reputable journals. This study also demonstrates collaboration anomalies and the phenomenon of suspicious collaboration in questionable papers and examines the predictors of the Russia-based paper mill. The value of coauthorship slots offered by International Publisher LLC in 2019-2021 is estimated at $6.5 million. Since the study analysed a particular paper mill, it is likely that the number of papers with forged authorship is much higher.