How much for a fake authorship? Ad database reveals secrets of scientific fraud

The cost of authorship slots on studies produced by papermills ranges from less than $100 to more than $5000, an analysis found. Credit: Ievgen Chabanov/Alamy Researchers have amassed a data set of thousands of advertisements selling research-paper authorships online, shedding light on the global marketplace for academic fraud. The collection — the largest of its kind — contains more than 18,700 adverts that were posted between March 2020 and early April 2026 by seven paper mills — businesses that produce fake or low-quality research and sell authorships . Together, the companies cater to academics in the Middle East, Central Asia, Eastern Europe and India. Authorship for sale: Nature investigates how paper mills work An analysis of the advert data found that a first-author slot on an article sold by a paper mill costs a median value of nearly US$800, with prices ranging from $57 to more than $5,600. The work is described in a preprint submitted to arXiv this week. Researchers, publishers and indexing services could use the list of adverts to screen their publications and audit which journals and research topics are most likely to be targeted, says study co-author Reese Richardson, a metascientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. …