As a publisher committed to upholding the highest standards of peer review and ethical publishing, the Royal Society of Chemistry takes a zero-tolerance approach to any alleged fraud in our journals. Over the course of 2020, we carried out an extensive investigation resulting in the retraction of 70 articles that we believe to have been the result of so-called “paper mills”. Paper mills are organisations offering fraudulent or fabricated manuscripts and submission services, for a fee. This systematic production of falsified research poses a growing threat to the integrity of the scientific literature. That’s why we felt it was important to speak out on the issue and be open and transparent about the nature of the retractions we were making.<br/>Since uncovering and retracting these articles, we have introduced additional preventative measures on our own journals, including enhanced submission screening, and additional training for our editors. We continue to work to share our learnings with others — detecting paper mill submissions, and preventing their publication, is an important issue across the publishing industry and the scientific community as a whole, and requires a joined-up response.

Paper mills: Detecting, investigating, and preventing systematic fraud in the scientific literature

ACS Fall 2021

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.