Thank you to everyone who contributed to this incredible momentum. And so much more to come in 2025. Happy holidays, STM.

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United2Act — a joint initiative by COPE and STM — has spent the past year taking decisive action to address the collective challenge of paper mills in scholarly publishing. Most recently, members of the United2Act working group on research have published a paper in PLOS Biology that outlines five critical questions that require urgent research to understand and address the scale, impact, and operations of paper mills:

• What are the features of paper mill products? Understanding these features is essential for detection and deterrence.

• What is the scale of the paper mill problem? How widespread are these publications across fields and over time?

• How do paper mills operate and evade detection? Investigating their methods is key to dismantling their operations.

• To what extent are researchers and scholars aware of paper mills? Awareness levels vary across disciplines, and education efforts must be informed by evidence.

• How are paper mills affecting science and scholarship? From citations to research practices, understanding their impact is vital to safeguarding the research ecosystem.

A Call to Action

The paper underscores the urgent need for dedicated funding, research, and collaborative efforts to combat paper mills and protect the integrity of science. Without bold and decisive action, paper mills will continue to scale, especially with the growing use of generative AI to fabricate manuscripts that are increasingly difficult to detect.

Watch this short video below for key takeaways — and access the full paper here. 

The United2Act initiative brings together publishers, researchers, institutions, and infrastructure leaders to tackle this collective challenge. By answering these critical questions, we can take the next steps to identify, expose, and eliminate paper mills — preserving trust in science for generations to come.

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As we approach the winter break, we invite you to join us for a brief journey: a three-minute recap of our collective achievements over the past year. What an adventure. And we’re only gaining momentum — we can’t wait to see what 2024 brings.

Thank you to all you do to help us advance trusted research.

Sound on!

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This June, Caroline Sutton, STM’s CEO, journeyed to China for two conferences, meetings and discussions around the ways we can best advance trusted research around the globe. Here, she lends a quick summary from the (windy!) Great Wall. 

After a three-year pause due to the pandemic, the Beijing International Book Fair recommenced its in-person exhibition on 15-18 June. Here, Caroline joined several other senior STM publishers at the Gala and delivered opening remarks at the first PubTech Conference, a satellite event.

She also joined a panel to discuss “The future of publishing driven by AI”, alongside Springer Nature’s Henning Schoenenberger. Several other individuals representing STM member publishers were also involved.

Whilst in Beijing, Caroline met with STM’s China Chapter to share information on STM’s strategies, the OA Dashboard, global activities, and other recent developments — and opened the floor for discussion and conversation with STM members. It was an opportunity to thank outgoing Chair Ella Chen and welcome onboard our new China Chapter Chair Ms. Xiaoling Kang.

As part of the Forum for World STM Journals, the STM China Chapter invited members and Chinese stakeholders to attend an STM introduction event. Here, Caroline shared an overview of STM, STM Trends 2027 and its upcoming Frankfurt Conference. Participants to this event included Ms. Su Wang, CAST Journal Publishing Director, Mr. Tieming Zhang, president of the Society of China University Journals, and dozens of local publishers and stakeholders.

From Beijing, Caroline journeyed to Xi’an, capital of north-western Shaanxi province, to help open the 6th Forum of World STM Journals, organized by CAST (China Association for Science and Technology), from 18th to 20th of June. This year Caroline was one of the two vice chairs of the Academic Committee of the Forum. (The chair is Prof. Wei Yang, former president of Zhejiang University, former president of NSFC). On the eve before the conference, Caroline joined the Open Science Promotion Consortium meeting as a Director of the Advisory Board. STM’s members are well represented among the membership of OSPC.

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The video is freely available to all; and the aim is to share it as widely as possible with journal editors.

This first module covers the most common types of image aberrations including: splicing, cloning, erasing, duplications – with and without alterations, over-contrasting and cropping.

While increasingly sophisticated digital tools are being developed to detect image manipulation, human oversight to interpret these results remains essential. This series of videos will help prepare better equip the editors who are providing this oversight.

“This is a terrific educational resource for editors and publishers, introducing principles of image integrity screening and illustrating how to detect aberrations typically seen in scientific literature. The first module in the series provides basic tools to screen images for alteration and duplication. We hope editors will find this video useful while working to protect the integrity of scientific records.”

—Teodoro Pulvirenti, Ph.D
Editorial Director, Journals Publishing Group
ACS Publications Division

The series is a product of the STM Working Group on Image Alteration and Duplication Detection which includes members from Elsevier, JAMA, Aries Systems, the American Physiological Society, EMBO Press, the American Chemical Society, BMJ, Rockefeller University Press, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Atypon and STM.

Watch the Video

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