Experiment shows research paper authorship can be bought for as little as $200
A journalistic experiment by Estonia's ERR found it strikingly easy to buy authorship of fake or stolen research papers on social media. Experts warn the black market thrives on mounting pressure to publish and steals real researchers' work.
In academia, the number of published papers can determine a researcher's salary, position and career prospects. That pressure has fueled a shadowy industry of so-called paper mills, which sell authorship of bogus or stolen research papers, often marketing themselves through social media.
To test how accessible this market is, journalists from Estonia's ERR contacted seven sellers advertising in Facebook groups with innocuous-sounding names. Posing as a fictional computer scientist, they received five responses on WhatsApp within half an hour. Prices ranged from $200 for co-authorship in a fisheries journal to $800 for a paper promised publication within just 20 days — far faster than a normal peer-review process.
Where the content comes from
Some papers sold by these mills are AI-generated, but many are based on genuine, often obscure or foreign-language research that has been machine-translated and altered to evade plagiarism checks. That appears to be what happened to Lauri Laanisto, a macroecology professor at the Estonian University of Life Sciences, whose study was resubmitted under a different title and a fabricated author's name — a person with no verifiable affiliation to the listed Chinese university.
Paper mills reportedly bypass peer review by supplying journals with fake reviewer contacts or bribing editors. A study published in PNAS identified nearly 30,000 suspicious paper-mill articles in academic databases, with researchers estimating that roughly 75 percent of such junk will never be removed.
Laanisto says selling co-authorship has existed for at least two decades, but the practice has become far more accessible, operating essentially around the clock. He attributes the problem to relentless publish-or-perish pressure, which inevitably erodes research quality. While he isn't aware of Estonian researchers using paper mills, the practice is more commonly linked to countries offering state bonuses for publications, such as China. Laanisto argues that real consequences — such as funding bans for those caught engaging in misconduct — would be the most effective deterrent.
