United2Act’s new phase: how the scholarly community can fight paper mills

United2Act, the international multi-stakeholder initiative combating paper mills, has published a comprehensive report detailing the outcomes of its first phase and issued a call for broader community engagement as it moves into its next stage of development.

The initiative, supported by STM and COPE, recently released a white paper outlining the results of its 18-month collaborative effort. This work brought together researchers, publishers, librarians, and funders to address what is referred to as a multi-million-pound industry that could threaten the very foundation of research integrity.

Dr Nandita Quaderi, Senior Vice President and Editor-in-Chief of the Web of Science at Clarivate, is stepping into the co-chair role alongside Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

On the shift towards implementation in the project’s second phase, Quaderi said: “This white paper is both a testament to what we can achieve through collaboration and a call to action for the global research community. Phase 2 of United2Act is about putting the resources we’ve developed through the initiative into practice – ensuring that everyone in the scholarly community, including funders and universities, is informed and equipped to address the challenges posed by paper mills.”

The report identifies paper mills as organisations or individuals that profit from creating, selling, peer reviewing or citing manuscripts containing low-value or fraudulent content. The initiative argues that the “publish or perish” culture has created an environment where such operations can thrive, with all forms of scholarly communication vulnerable to manipulation.

Phase 1’s key outputs include a comprehensive training toolkit, guidance on improving post-publication corrections, a peer-reviewed research manifesto, and definitions of trust markers for the publishing process. Initial training webinars attracted more than 350 participants from 39 countries, whilst the research manifesto published in PLOS Biology has been accessed more than 5,500 times.

The report acknowledges that certain stakeholder groups, particularly funders and institutions, were under-represented in Phase 1. The recommendations for Phase 2 emphasise the need for these groups to play a more central role, alongside calls for better funding mechanisms and tools to measure the initiative’s impact.

United2Act has attracted support from more than 50 organisations across five continents. The transition to Phase 2 comes as the scholarly publishing community grapples with rising retraction rates and increased detection of systematic manipulation, with the initiative’s emphasis on shared responsibility reflecting recognition that no single stakeholder group can address the paper mill problem independently.