Building Awareness of Research Paper Mills: An Open Educational Approach
Catherine Gracey, Fall 2026
What are Research Papermills?
〞
Paper mills are groups that generate fraudulent scholarship. They sell authorship on bogus papers, citations to boost paper rankings, or/and fake research results to be submitted to journals as legitimate studies.
Why?
Big Money!
Why do we care?
〞
...analysis estimates that 1.5-2% of all scientific papers published in 2022 closely resemble papermill works. Among biology and medicine papers, the rate rises to 3%
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[screenshot of website no longer available]
- $$ knowing participants for authorship
- Submit to legitimate journals
- Attempt to trick editors/peer-reviewers
- Take advantage of strain on resources
Paper Mills
- $$ authors to publish their work (an otherwise legitimate practice)
- Operate journals
- Do not conduct peer-review at all, or insufficient
Predatory Journals
Research Paper Mills ≠ Predatory Journals
What can we do?
Write an OER!
We wanted to create an accessible resource that collected information about what Papermills are and how they work into a single place
St. Francis Xavier University
Kaitlin Fuller
University of Toronto
Ana Patricia Ayala
University of New Brunswick
Catherine Gracey
Meet the Team
University of Toronto
Erica Nekolaichuk
Saint Mary's University
Alison Manley
3.
Feedback round from our community
5.
Copyediting, reference wrangling (mea culpa), publishing!
1.
Ideation, learning more about paper mills
2.
Initial drafting of content
4.
Incorporating feedback and final content changes
We worked on this project for ~18 months! (aka, most of my tenure at UNB!)
Community Feedback Round Aggregated
| Feedback | Resulting changes |
|---|---|
| Audience scope comments (initially we just focused on Early Career Researchers) | Adapted some of our language to be more inclusive of other researchers while maintining some specific messaging for ECR |
| Content scope comments (more content on predatory publishers?) | Avoided adding too much content, but contextualized relationship/similarities/differences between these two concepts |
| Pull apart what to do when publishing vs when consuming | Broke our 'what to do' section into two (researchers and readers) to get into nuances of each role |
| Clarity, source, emphasis sugestions | Case by case basis! |
Our final list of chapters came out to:
Our final list of chapters came out to:
Our final list of chapters came out to:
Our final list of chapters came out to:
Our final list of chapters came out to:
Our final list of chapters came out to:
- Developed using St. FX's instance of Articulate Rise, a digital publishing platform (similar to Pressbooks, but frankly just better looking)
- Knowledge checks embedded throughout
- Creative Commons CC BY NC-SA license applied
- Accompanying slide deck incoming!
- Paper Mills OER