Flood of fake science forces multiple journal closures

Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. “It’s like a virus mutating," said Dorothy Bishop, a psychologist at the University of Oxford, one of a multitude of researchers who track fraudulent science and has spotted suspected milled papers. Wiley said it would shut down four that had been “​​heavily compromised by paper mills," and for months it paused publishing Hindawi special issues entirely as hundreds of papers were retracted. One of those tools, the “Problematic Paper Screener," run by Guillaume Cabanac, a computer-science researcher who studies scholarly publishing at the Université Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier in France, scans the breadth of the published literature, some 130 million papers, looking for a range of red flags including “tortured phrases." A tool launched through STM, the trade group of publishers, now checks whether new submissions were submitted to multiple journals at once, according to Joris van Rossum, product director who leads the “STM Integrity Hub," launched in part to beat back paper mills.