Fake publishing - the greatest scientific fraud

The drivers of erosion of integrity and trust

In a digital world, it has become possible to sell AI-generated articles to scientists under immense career pressure in a ‘reputation economy’, where publication number and citation counts are the perceived currencies of success.

Over the last 20 years, the scale of fake publications has quietly grown to become a systemic problem. This has led to a steady decline in the quality and integrity of scientific publishing, driven by actors with different motives. On the one hand a pull-factor of dishonest authors seeking gains in reputation, promotions or funding supported by organized citation and reviewer networks, and, on the other hand, a push-factor of for-profit ‘editing agencies’ (so-called ‘paper mills’) producing fake-publications industrial-scale, and predatory publishers that publish low quality papers and indirectly benefit publishers charging excessive publication fees.

The consequences

The consequences are manifold: avalanches of invitations to publish in obscure journals and conferences clogging our email-boxes, masses of low-quality or fake publications that no one reads, fatigue of overburdened reviewers and editors, citation manipulations, sloppy quality control, mis- or disinformation, irreproducible experiments, and associated expenses of misguided studies. The growing number of publications and sometimes unfair APCs overwhelm funders and libraries.

Estimates of the proportion of fake publications range from 1–3 % up to 30%. One non-profit publisher reports a flood of ‘junk papers’, of which 90% must be rejected after integrity and quality checks. A quantitative analysis of 17,000 publications estimates the number of true fake publications in biomedicine of at least 5.8% and 15.3% are suspicious (Sabel et al. 2025, SpringerLink). It matches the observation that 14% biomedical abstracts had AI-generated text. Even the conservative 5.8% alone translates to about 100,000 fake biomedical papers per year.

Though the number of fake papers in Europe or the U.S. is relatively small, the collateral damage is global and severe: scientific analyses, experiments, and clinical trials fail more often; scientific and technical knowledge becomes less reliable or misleading; and supposedly safe and effective therapies, materials, and technologies do not deliver what they promise. The direct financial impact is alarming. Assuming an average price tag of €10,000 per fake paper (range €2,000–25,000) and publication fees of €3,500 for journals of commercial publishers (extremes: €10,000–12,000), the misinvestments by governments, foundations, and industry totals roughly €4 billion per year, while global R&D losses may reach €145 billion (5.8 % of €2.5 trillion). Indirect costs are immeasurable: harm to patients, human suffering, irreproducible experiments (costing €28 billion annually in pharma research alone), industrial malinvestments, environmental damage, slowed economic progress, and even security concerns.

Without countermeasures, this situation will erode public trust in science and undermine the credibility of honest authors, institutions, publishers, and nations. If nothing changes, our global archive of knowledge (the ‘permanent scientific record’) will become increasingly polluted and AI systems trained on such fake information will become compromised.

The Stockholm Declaration - a call for global action to rescue science integrity

Despite several public declarations about research integrity and publishing ethics from science interest groups, the downward trend has not been stopped.

Because a single academy or country alone cannot realistically be expected to change the international science publishing practices, a global action plan is needed. To define necessary actions, a group of scientists and stakeholders met to draft the ‘Stockholm Declaration’ for the ‘Reformation of Science Publishing’ at a June 2025 meeting at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Our ‘Stockholm Declaration’ is a call to globally unite a group of willing governments, funders, academies, and scientific organizations to act swiftly to help restore trust in science.

It’s all about Public-a(c)tion

With the Stockholm Declaration we proposed 34 specific actions to reform science publishing to inspire policymakers, funders and administration bodies of universities and research institutions which include the following:

• Abandon the ‘publish-or-perish’ culture at research institutions by eliminating publication counting and citation metrics as ‘quality’ markers; focus on quality, not quantity, when making decisions about appointments, tenure, or funding.
• Gradual transition to sustainable, non-commercial publishing models where journals are community-owned and authors retain their copyright.
• Promotion of ‘diamond’ open-access models (free to publish, free to read).
• Free, open access and public rights to use digital archives and their AI-based analysis, data or texts, including material which is already in the permanent scientific record.
• Identification of fake text, images, and data by accredited and independent non-profit organizations.
• Public quality and integrity ‘scoreboards” for journals and publishers to create competition among them to attract submissions.
• Developing and enforcing laws and regulations by independent bodies for quality control, and draft legal frameworks to sanction authors, paper mills, journals, or publishers.

Read the full article ‘Reformation of science publishing: the Stockholm Declaration’ published in Royal Society Open Science.

Image: Members of the June 2025 workshop 'Reformation of Science Publishing' at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. At the front row center is Hans Ellegren, blue suit (Secretary General of the Academy), to his right Dan Larhammar (former president of the Academy) and Bernhard Sabel to his left.

References

• Abalkina A, Aquarius R, Bik E, Bimler D, Bishop D, Byrne J, Cabanac G, Day A, Labbé C, Wise N. 'Stamp out paper mills' - science sleuths on how to fight fake research. Nature. 2025 Jan;637(8048):1047-1050. doi: 10.1038/d41586-025-00212-1
• Chow, V. (2025)  AI-powered fraud: Chinese paper mills are mass-producing fake academic research. Nature – News, 15 Oct
• Mallapaty, S. (2025) Signs of AI-generated text found in 14% of biomedical abstracts last year. Nature, News, July 2
• Piller, C. (2024) Picture imperfect - Scores of papers by Eliezer Masliah, prominent neuroscientist and top NIH official, fall under suspicion. Science – News Section, 26 September
• Richardson RAK, Hong SS, Byrne JA, Stoeger T, Amaral LAN. The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2025 Aug 12;122(32):e2420092122. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2420092122. Epub 2025
• Sabel BA, Larhammar D (2025). Reformation of Science Publishing – the Stockholm Declaration. R. Soc. Open Sci. 12: 251805. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.251805
• Sabel BA, Knaack E, Gigerenzer G, Bilc M (2025).  Fake Publications in Biomedical Science: Red-flagging Method Indicates Mass Production. Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00210-025-04275-9
• Sabel, B. (2024) Fake-Mafia in der Wissenschaft, Verlag Kohlhammer, Germany, 264 pages