Academia’s Secret Black Market Explained 

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Seriously, this is nuts. 11k papers that were "peer reviewed" were retracted recently. You are doing a great job of educating folks on this issue!!

In my recent experience, publishers have started to emphasize that once the article is accepted, the author list cannot be changed. Now I understand why

Careful Pete! (7:15) Elsevier, Oxford, Springer, Taylor & Francis, etc., are NOT journals; they are publishers.

As a former editor of four different journals over the past 30 years, we have always had a policy that all authors must be listed at time of submission. We have never allowed the addition of any authors after acceptance as a change of authorship would be grounds for revoking the acceptance. I am shocked that other journals allowed this.

Cost of adding an extra author to your paper: Nil Value of being an author: Keeps your career alive Changing the system so the above isn't true is the only long term fix for this issue.

And here I am taking months to get actual research published...

How in the world does someone think to get away with publishing two academic articles a week? I understand the unscrupulous will find ways to cheat, but to do it so clumsily? This is like a minimum wage earner robbing a bank, then returning to work in a Rolls Royce and not expecting suspicion!

As a practicing physician, my patients are being deeply harmed by this academic behavior. I can no longer trust what is being published to treat patients.

As a journal editor, I was already approached by a Russia-based paper mill years ago. They offered several incentives, cash sums for papers, bonuses for speed and volume. They would even provide the peer reviewers, to make the process look legit on the system. I turned the offer down, but I wonder how many of my peers could not resist the temptation to make a quick buck (editors' remuneration is not usually more than a small lump sum stipend, if that).

So I used to work in corporate industry research, where all the focus was on being first to market with some relevant number. I could not stand it and I came to academia, guess who wears a dunce cap all the time now ! Thanks, I will share this with my family so they can understand how shady and murky academic publishing is. Its like nothing should be falsiable and you should get everything correct on first try or the funding or scholarship goes into the air. I have felt extremely mentally stressed, comparable to my corporate job where I was doing 10-11 hours for 5 days a week on stupid deadlines. The only thing I feel at times has changed for me, is that I set deadlines now. But with this whole, line goes up, number goes up approach even prevailing in academia. Maybe even that optimism will go away. Still thank you Pete :) keep up the great work.

as a researcher, it's honestly exhausting to think about how much of a burden honesty is. We spend a year or more of intense effort on a paper, while these psychopaths can just buy them with cash or fabricate them and the result looks the same on our CVs.

Trustworthiness of Academia? Almost zero after I did my PhD in science.

“Not like rubbish no name journals “ at this point with all the stuff you’ve been revealing my trust for reputable journals is starting to feel the same.

We put so much faith in journals and their peer-review processes, it's hard to think about that faith being taken advantage of like this.

I'm stunned you can apparently submit to a "good" journal, and the standards are so lax that you can pull off all this craziness. If you were forced to have a 20 minute phone call with a subject matter expert discussing the paper before submitting, it would massively cut down on this fraud. And it wouldn't cost the journal that much to implement. The fact that scientists allow journals to have these low standards brings their occupation into disrepute.

Publish or Perish is alive and strong.

great job. economics field also follows similar practices. an lse professor re-run the tests for many famous economics papers and found data manipulation but i cant remember the title of his article.

Publishing scientific papers on average 2-3 days, is not suspicious at all.

As a molecular biology student im dead by the end of this video

10:47 LOL at the Paper Name Generator!™ 😂

In the past I could do research on any topic and feel informed. Now, unless my expertise is in the subject I'm unsure if I can trust what I am reading.

It took me THREE years to do enough worthwhile research to publish ONE good paper. That included coming up with the idea, experiments, and finding and keeping someone willing to let me do it. System busted. Yeah. ...1991 PhD EE graduate.

"So Journals step up!" Journals: "Wait, what? We need to actually work now? WTF can we outsource it to research community? "

I'm glad you're bringing attention to this problem.

Elsevier, OUP, Taylor&Francis etc. are publishers, not journals. Would be interesting how prestigious exactly the journals can be, bc. I reckon nobody would fall for a wrong author in high profile journals.

"Follow the science" "Safe and effective" "Global boiling"

Is he daft? Didn’t he think that people would notice someone writing papers at this rate?

As a former academic i can tell you with 100% confidence that this sort of gaming of the system to obtain funding and tenure is widespread. I pointed this out repeatedly over several years and was ignored or worse, attacked. You should not trust the research base that is out there in the literature, nor should you trust academia to police itself or correct itself. The rot is deep in the roots and too many people have too much to lose.

please don't stop!

Please make a video on paper mill master from India, Abhijit Dey, assistant professor, Presidency University.

Wow I had no idea about this. This looks so cool. 5k for an authorship placement on a good paper is awesome!!!

Pete I will literally send you a free microphone… please use a mic.

Comedy gold, love it. Keep the heat on these “researcher” goobers

Great camera setup but, mate, you need a better mic. Also when you mentioned the journals where these papers were published you named publishrs. Plenty of crap journals under those publishers.

I want science to progress, to be as Carl Sagan put it "a candle in the dark". But academic publishing has no defenses against fraud when it has such a cosy relationship with academics who have massive motivation to push out poor or just outright fraudulent papers and peer review is hopeless to detect it. When was the last time peer review spotted fraud? The problem is the "star system" in academia that rewards productivity over everything else to advance careers.

It would be nice to see a video on what academic institutions are doing to fix this problem.

As someone familiar with cytometry plots, you could've at least attempted to explain them, if you pulled them up. The statement you make is correct but "This is fake and I won't explain why" is not the scientific way of arguing your case.

If publishing was less valuable to authors, then we would see less of this. Can it be made less valuable?

I love your videos but damn 21% OF THIS VIDEO WAS AN AD!

7:23: These are all publishers (all major for-profit publishers!), not journals.

Cytometry plot is basically just the readout of a flow cytometer,

you make realy good videos , keep it up :)

I lean more on the second explanation because most journals have separate deadlines for the author list and final revision of the paper.

I trained a image generation model on western blots out of interest and it worked surprisingly well. Scary times are truly ahead.

There was an interview with one of the group that submitted ridiculous, made up research papers, and had several accepted before they were figured out. Their goal wasn't fraud, but rather to expose the lax standards of the journals. He said after a few submissions, he figured out a "formula" for getting a paper accepted, and a high success rate immediately followed. One paper was on something like observations of homosexual behavior of dogs at a dog park. Another was a translation of a section of Mein Kampf into a feminist tract. The journals need to publish just as badly as the academics need to be published.

(Don't mind me here frantically skipping back and forth because I just can't figure out if I'm in the Ground News sponsor segment now or not.)

Glad to see you using the scientific term " tippy top"

it's strange to see a familiar face in these videos, Berto was at the University of Padua when I was also a student in the faculty of engineering, I think he taught a course in machine design although I had a different professor.

I just submitted a paper for school - no original research, no new conclusions, just an undergrad literature review - and suddenly I'm wondering if what I wrote was based on solid research. Many of the papers came to similar or the same conclusions and sort of serve as a backup for each other, but if I'm just learning about this stuff, how am I supposed to be certain that all 12 (?) were legitimate? This is... Is there a career in doing research forensics? I'd like to channel my frustration, and I am decently good following things back to the source with knockoff products and random quotes. I wish a job like that wasn't necessary but if it's going to become a 21st century career, I might like to be involved.

Tell me again, why do we need journals? What value do they provide again?

After looking at some of International Publishing's listings, it appears that they are now recruiting authors prior to submission. Many of the publication dates are not until 2025 or even 2026 in some cases. It makes me wonder if there are any companies that allow academics to pay to meaningfully participate on others' papers. As in, some data analysis or task is reserved for paying authors to do in order to defend against fraud allegations.

Could you provide info/blog link for Elizabeth Bik in the description

I Love all your vids

Every week I get two or three e-mails from "publishers" asking me if I want to send specific papers to their journals. Papers that have already been published. I suppose people may change the title, re-arrange the abstract and publish a paper twice, and the "publishers" know this.

Great channel.

Pete is dropping truth bombs and bringing the receipts! Great channel.

That list was publishing groups not journals

Yeah, those flow cytometry dot plots look really sus. There is barely any stray cells and the cells are so perfectly clustered, almost like they're not cells...

One should train LLMS to detect similar papers (once you have a couple of them)

Over 20% of this video is an ad

Those flow plots look INSANE

Listening to this, I'm drawn to this question: how *do* journals vet the papers which are submitted to them? Do they have a staff of experts to do a sanity check, are they counting the average syllable length of words, or...?

So if every time I played Mad Libs in high school and used scientific terms instead of synonyms for penis I could've gotten published in a medical journal? Wack

All of science papers need to go in the trash and it all needs to be redone properly without corporate corruption

Berto's undermining the term Doctor of Philosophy and reaffirming that his academic title of "Ph.D." truly meant Piled High and Deep.

So what's the solution? Sounds like paying for an independent review or an independent lab to replicate it.

So, I could go out and spend $1000 and get my name as an author on a paper? This sounds like fun. I actually sympathize with the Chinese medical students, buying a paper seems like the correct answer for getting through the bureaucratic morass and getting on to what they aspire to do: heal patients.

If people understood mimetics and perverse incentives we might be able to foresee and prevent these problems in the sciences. But people are averse to looking at unforseen consequences and will always create models and systems with the assumption that people will have good motives and behavior. A system will always evolve towards a maximal state if there are no corrective measures or checks and balances, and they have to be reviewed regularly.

Pete, Walters, Springer, etc. are not journals, they're publisher conglomerates

I believe International Publisher llc. has an office right next to Real Business Inc. and Dr. Scienence & Partners

The journal system needs to be abolished.

Why don't they just cut out the middleman and auction off the Nobel Prize?

Is the validity of the data necessarily compromised?

How much of this is due to the public? Do we support ethical researchers? Seems like only the corrupt survive.

I don't think you have nailed the root cause. Some people would never be tempted by evil and deceit because they are forthright, virtuous, bound by a feeling for justice and a courage to think for themselves, the fortitude to withstand temptation and the temperance needed to endure hardship. Others aren't. Why? That is the question that you need to ask yourself, however obvious it may seem to me

In addition to all this phoney stuff, many "legitimate" papers, despite peer review, have substantial flaws or get wildly misconstrued by later works by other "scholars".

Not related to this video, but to the stuff the channel talks about in general: My friend told me their advisor set up a symposium in Europe so that he could have taxpayers fund his and his friends' travel to his destination wedding.

Resuscitating the exposé. As valuable as anything on RU-vid today.

do you think theres fraud in other types of writeups as well? eg: whitepapers,technical docs,industry reports,case studies, etc Im guessing there is but its not as bad cause of the nature of these other types of writeups

Wait until you discover some countries doesn't have regulations to OPEN a scientific journal

If you steal from one source, that's plagiarism. If you steal from many, that's research. Remember that PhD just means "Piled Higher and Deeper".

Similar to Hindawi. MDPI is very suspicious? It had been investigated in the past several times for shady and corrupted practices?

Interesting video, however you called Cambridge University Press and Springer Nature (among others) “journals” even though they’re not publishers.

The solution isn't going to come from the publishers, they're famously the most greedy of all. We're going to have to do this together, or else that last 20+ years of research output is suspect. 😬

The problems with highlighting the bias of a publication are several. For instance, how are publications that assiduously avoid bias categorized? And how do we expose the bias of the auditor who assigns them a bias? A major problem facing independent publications over the past few years has been that if they do not adhere to the prevalent bias in the mainstream, they are labeled "extremist" or "far-right" over and above the objectons of the publications themselves. This is done explicitly to impugn the credibility of sources that may actually be intent on objectivity. Since it is can be difficult to ascertain the bias of the service that categorizes sources on the basis of bias, the ultimate value of such a service is suspect. One cannot know the motivations behind the categorizing of a specificn source according ro bias--nor should an intelligent adult simply trust such a service that purports to do so. Such a service can easily become a murky form of censorship and thought policing. The final problem with such a service is that it would tend to apply an ideological spectrum that may be irrelevant to the subject matter at hand. It would tend to have a kind of intellectually homogenizing effect that would ultimately distort the aims of pure inquiry. The presumptuous pairing of "left-leaning" and "high factuality" in this video should raise alarms, especially when contrasted with "right-leaning" and "low factuality". Twenty years ago, such obvious bias would have stood out as improper and even laughable. Intelligent people of any ideological persuasion would have avoided a service that espoused such heavy handed and flagrant biases. Today, this kind of thing is embraced. Very sad.

Bother, your videos are way more popular now. Can you fix the audio?

Currency is the currency of the age, even in Academia.

Papermill, ah the smell of cooking cabbage.

You ought to start looking at all the global warming papers out there, starting with Michael Mann and his "hockey stick." I believe we're at a tipping point where the issue of climate change will wither away, being as it is nothing but ideology over genuine science.

Damn. I thought Hendrik Schön with his 1 paper/week was the very best.

What do you do if you think that an author is participating in a paper mill?

Ex NTNU PhD here. In the introduction the professor working in Norway was mentioned with 2 papers per week. It was indeed a big scandal here. Yet, you immediately proceed to paper mills. With all my disrepect to that researcher, it is not scientific or ethical to connect these disconnected things. Filippo Berto has comparable amount of papers (274) than both paper mill schemes mentioned in this video. There is no any proof that any of his papers were published in such a way. Yet, there is a way easier explanation. A lot of big names are co-authors in nearly all papers in their labs. Imagine a strong group supervised by a leading professor. If you have 20-30 PhDs and postdocs publishing 2 first-author and 4 not-first author paper per year, it is already enough to have 2 paper per week. And contribution of such leader can also include things like: he developed a software many others are using, he published a valuable dataset used by many others, etc. Sometimes this is overused, like in Berto's case. But he is probably not using any paper mills, as many tens of his papers are cited over 100 times and they are all in the same field (material engineering). So, yes, it is not cool to co-author so many papers of people who are dependant on you (young career researchers) and cannot say no. Yet, it is also not cool to make a video falsely connecting two disconnected things.

Damn. So Pete should we trust any journal?

I wonder if publishing a fake paper at the beginning of your career impacts your entire body of work?

03:37 Someone has been watching Game Changer, I see.

I am not surprised. I have seen this kind of academics a lot in China.

Biased gatekeeping is worse, esp on HBD topics they will reject out of hand.

"Believe the science"

You are exactly right, usa