Adopting a united front against paper mills
Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe outlines the work of United2Act Against Paper Mills, working to address the challenge of paper mills
United2Act Against Paper Mills is an international group of stakeholders working collaboratively to address the collective challenge of paper mills in scholarly publishing. Having completed its first phase of work, the initiative is now entering Phase 2, running from 2025 to 2027. While Phase 1 focused on developing guidance, training resources, and publications, Phase 2 focuses on activating those materials through broader engagement across the scholarly community.
The problems posed by paper mills are well known to publishers, but other stakeholder communities that do not have the same day-to-day experiences with paper mill content may not be fully aware of the growing challenges. Paper mills are organisations that profit from producing and selling manuscripts containing fraudulent content for submission to academic journals. Their services typically include selling authorship on fabricated or manipulated papers, arranging false peer reviews, and generating work designed to pass as legitimate research. The problem has been growing steadily across scholarly publishing and affects journals, publishers, institutions, and the researchers who rely on an accurate and trustworthy literature.
Because paper mills exploit the pressures researchers face to publish — particularly in systems where career advancement depends heavily on publication records — the problem is structural as well as behavioural, and addressing it requires simultaneous action from multiple directions.
The origins of United2Act
United2Act was established in 2023 as a multi-stakeholder project, sponsored by COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics) and STM, the trade association for scholarly publishers. It brought together publishers, research organisations, universities, funders, technology providers, and individual researchers around a shared Consensus Statement outlining five areas of collaborative action: education and awareness; improving post-publication corrections; researching paper mills; developing trust markers; and strengthening cross-sector communication. A working group was established for each area.
The Consensus Statement has since been signed by organisations spanning five continents. Signatories include major publishers such as Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, PLOS, MDPI, and Frontiers, as well as infrastructure and technology organisations including Clarivate, Crossref, ORCID, Turnitin, and Digital Science. Funders and research bodies such as the European Research Council, the Global Young Academy, and the National Research and Innovation Agency are also among the signatories, as are professional societies, regional publishers, and service organisations from across the globe. The breadth of the signatory list reflects the initiative’s foundational premise: that paper mills are an industry-wide problem requiring an industry-wide response.
What Phase 1 produced
Five working groups spent the 2023–2025 period developing a range of outputs. Resources intended for all stakeholder groups — publishers, institutions, funders, and associations — include a call for collaboration to end the demand for paper mills, a document identifying stakeholder responsibilities, consensus terminology related to paper mills, and the Phase 1 Report and Recommendations.
Resources developed primarily for publishers and institutions include a training toolkit on paper mills, a peer-reviewed article published in Learned Publishing on rethinking peer review using the Swiss Cheese Model to better flag problematic manuscripts, recommendations for improving the process of making post-publication corrections, and trust markers for identifying indicators of trustworthy practice in authorship, peer review, and editorial processes.
For funders and institutions specifically, Phase 1 produced a call for research to address the threat of paper mills, published in PLOS Biology, along with a bibliography to support research on the topic. All of these outputs are available through the United2Act OSF project page at osf.io/d392b.
Phase 1 also documented a gap: funders and research institutions were under-represented in the initiative’s first phase. Engaging these groups more directly is one of Phase 2’s explicit priorities.
The Structure of Phase 2
Phase 2 is organised around three working groups, each with a distinct focus and a designated chair.
The Education Working Group, chaired by Jason Hu of Taylor & Francis, is responsible for implementing and promoting the use of the educational resources developed in Phase 1. Its goal is to increase the reach of the training toolkit and related materials so that they are actively used by editors, reviewers, librarians, and researchers.
The Stakeholder Responsibilities Working Group, chaired by Michael Streeter of Wiley, focuses on driving adoption of the guidance developed on stakeholder roles in preventing and addressing paper mill activity. This involves working with publishers, institutions, and other organisations to validate and then embed the responsibilities framework into their actual processes and policies.
The Funder Outreach Working Group, chaired by Liz Allen of Research Consulting, is dedicated to engaging research funders directly. Its work involves helping funders understand the paper mill problem in the context of their own grantees and funded research, and supporting them in embedding integrity safeguards into their requirements and practices.
The Phase 2 Steering Group is co-chaired by Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Nandita Quaderi of Clarivate. The remaining Steering Group members are the three working group chairs, alongside Natalie Ridgeway of COPE, and Ruth King, who serves as Project Manager.
Getting involved
The resources developed during Phase 1 are publicly available and ready to use. Publishers, institutions, funders, and professional associations are encouraged to incorporate the training materials and guidance documents into their own workflows, editorial policies, and professional development programmes. The trust marker definitions and the stakeholder responsibilities framework are also well-suited to embedding in institutional and editorial practice.
Organisations and individuals who would like to engage more directly with Phase 2 can reach the initiative through Ruth King, Project Manager, at Contact@United2Act.org. Further information is available at united2act.org.
Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe is Co-chair of United2Act Against Paper Mills and Professor and Coordinator for Research Professional Development at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.