Fake science at scale, via organized paper mills (in PNAS and the NYT)

 Here's a recent paper from PNAS, analyzing the organized activity of paper mills producing fraudulent papers.

The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly  by Reese A. K. Richardson, Jennifer A. Byrne, and Luís A. Nunes Amaral
Edited by Daniel Acuña, University of Colorado Boulder, accepted by Editorial Board Member Mark Granovetter August 4, 2025  https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.242009212

Abstract
Science is characterized by collaboration and cooperation, but also by uncertainty, competition, and inequality. While there has always been some concern that these pressures may compel some to defect from the scientific research ethos—i.e., fail to make genuine contributions to the production of knowledge or to the training of an expert workforce—the focus has largely been on the actions of lone individuals. Recently, however, reports of coordinated scientific fraud activities have increased. Some suggest that the ease of communication provided by the internet and open-access publishing have created the conditions for the emergence of entities—paper mills (i.e., sellers of mass-produced low quality and fabricated research), brokers (i.e., conduits between producers and publishers of fraudulent research), predatory journals, who do not conduct any quality controls on submissions—that facilitate systematic scientific fraud. Here, we demonstrate through case studies that i) individuals have cooperated to publish papers that were eventually retracted in a number of journals, ii) brokers have enabled publication in targeted journals at scale, and iii), within a field of science, not all subfields are equally targeted for scientific fraud. Our results reveal some of the strategies that enable the entities promoting scientific fraud to evade interventions. Our final analysis suggests that this ability to evade interventions is enabling the number of fraudulent publications to grow at a rate far outpacing that of legitimate science.

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And here's the story in the NYT:

Fraudulent Scientific Papers Are Rapidly Increasing, Study Finds
A statistical analysis found that the number of fake journal articles being churned out by “paper mills” is doubling every year and a half. by Carl Zimmer