Reply to Singer: Strike paper mills at the root

We thank Singer for his commentary ( 1 ) on our study ( 2 ).We share his enthusiasm for fighting industrialized scientific fraud and agree that the scientific community should prioritize developing new, scalable strategies for identifying fraudulent manuscripts pre-and post-publication.We also hope that science-of-science approaches can be used to characterize factors underlying the growth of the industry, design interventions and evaluate their efficacy.We echo Singer's sentiments and prior calls to action ( 3 , 4 ).However, the rise of industrialized scientific fraud should not be thought of as inevitable.We believe that the emergent industry for scientific fraud is most likely a consequence of a hypercompetitive and highly unequal scientific enterprise, not a consequence of human nature nor any "tragedy of the commons" ( 5 ) fundamental to human scientific behavior.In the scientific enterprise we have come to inhabit, scientists compete with their peers for a scarce pool of resources and career opportunities and evaluate each other with easily gamed metrics ( 6 ).This environment was built through a series of deliberate policy decisions.Deliberate policy decisions can therefore create a fairer, more sustainable environment where aspiring scientists and professionals are not driven to engage in systematic scientific fraud.Until this change occurs, we fear that stakeholders will be stuck employing reactive, insufficient measures to which paper mills and similar organizations can easily adapt.In the meantime, scientists should ensure that new countermeasures against scientific fraud, such as those described by Singer, are carefully designed to hamper fraudulent science while not impeding genuine science ( 7 ).Paper mills thrive in a world where increased "productivity"-however misguidedly defined-has become the apparent goal of research and scholarship.Introducing additional steps that are not meaningfully enforced or that are easy to circumvent will only gift unfair competitive advantages to defectors.For instance, in response to journals now routinely employing text-similarity software to combat plagiarism in submissions, paper mills now frequently advertise access to this software to mask plagiarism before it is discovered by the journal (one such advertisement is shown in Fig. 1 ).Singer also states that journals "that cannot guarantee authenticity will shed credibility and, eventually, impact factor".We caution that this should not be taken as a foregone conclusion.The examples presented in ref. 2 suggest journals and publishers rarely face consequences (including informal consequences like reputational harm) due to breaches in quality control, even on a large scale.Indeed, paper mills exist to facilitate the manipulation of markers of success and reputation.These markers can include citation-based metrics ( 8 ) like journal impact factor ( 9 ).We encourage further empirical study of the factors influencing the frequency and severity of measurable reputational harm to journals and publishers after large-scale breaches of publication integrity.

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