China’s supreme court calls for crack down on paper mills

"China’s highest court has called for a crack down on the activities of paper mills, businesses that churn out fraudulent or poor-quality manuscripts and sell authorships. Some researchers are cautiously optimistic that the court’s guidance will help curb the use of these services, while others think the impact will be minimal.

“This is the first time the supreme court has issued guidance on paper mills and on scientific fraud,” says Wang Fei, who studies research-integrity policy at Dalian University of Technology in China.

Paper mills sell suspect research and authorships to researchers who want journal articles to burnish their CVs. They are a significant contributor to overall research misconduct, particularly in China...."