Shadowy organisations referred to as "paper mills" are generating profit by providing fraudulent academic authorship for scientific papers, IP registrations, and other scholarly outputs. These mills offer to list individuals as authors on scientific journal articles for a fee, frequently involving falsified research that circumvents the peer review process.
Dr Reese Richardson, a scientific research integrity specialist, has been tracking these operations. He notes that paper mill activity has significantly increased over the past 15 years, with one 2025 estimate suggesting their output has been doubling roughly every 18 months. This activity is described as an industrialised injection of falsified data, which pollutes the scientific ecosystem and may compromise medical research, drug discovery, and clinical trials.
Richardson, along with Anna Abalkina and Spencer Hong, detailed over 18,000 advertisements from seven paper mills in seven countries between 2020 and 2026 in a recent paper that has not yet undergone peer review. Their analysis found that the median price for buying authorship is around US$800, though some advertisements offered authorship for as little as US$30.
The research also identified advertisements related to copyrights and design registrations, which can be used to bolster academic resumes. Richardson's work has previously highlighted exploitation of IP systems in the UK and found 12 instances of design registrations advertised by a paper mill in India, catering to Indian academics, which were marketed as "Australian design patents."