Frederik Joelving, Retraction Watch; Cyril Labbé, Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA), and Guillaume Cabanac, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse

Over the past decade, furtive commercial entities around the world have industrialized the production, sale and dissemination of bogus scholarly research. These paper mills are profiting by undermining the literature that everyone from doctors to engineers rely on to make decisions about human lives.

It is exceedingly difficult to get a handle on exactly how big the problem is. About 55,000 scholarly papers have been retracted to date, for a variety of reasons, but scientists and companies who screen the scientific literature for telltale signs of fraud estimate that there are many more fake papers circulating – possibly as many as several hundred thousand. This fake research can confound legitimate researchers who must wade through dense equations, evidence, images and methodologies, only to find that they were made up.

Even when bogus papers are spotted – usually by amateur sleuths on their own time – academic journals are often slow to retract the papers, allowing the articles to taint what many consider sacrosanct: the vast global library of scholarly work that introduces new ideas, reviews and other research and discusses findings.

These fake papers are slowing research that has helped millions of people with lifesaving medicine and therapies, from cancer to COVID-19. Analysts’ data shows that fields related to cancer and medicine are particularly hard-hit, while areas such as philosophy and art are less affected.

To better understand the scope, ramifications and potential solutions of this metastasizing assault on science, we – a contributing editor at Retraction Watch, a website that reports on retractions of scientific papers and related topics, and two computer scientists at France’s Université Toulouse III–Paul Sabatier and Université Grenoble Alpes who specialize in detecting bogus publications – spent six months investigating paper mills.

Co-author Guillaume Cabanac also developed the Problematic Paper Screener, which filters 130 million new and old scholarly papers every week looking for nine types of clues that a paper might be fake or contain errors.

An obscure molecule

Frank Cackowski at Detroit’s Wayne State University was confused.

The oncologist was studying a sequence of chemical reactions in cells to see whether they could be a target for drugs against prostate cancer. A paper from 2018 in the American Journal of Cancer Research piqued his interest when he read that a little-known molecule called SNHG1 might interact with the chemical reactions he was exploring. He and fellow Wayne State researcher Steven Zielske began experiments but found no link.

Meanwhile, Zielske had grown suspicious of the paper. Two graphs showing results for different cell lines were identical, he noticed, which “would be like pouring water into two glasses with your eyes closed and the levels coming out exactly the same.” Another graph and a table in the article also inexplicably contained identical data.

Zielske described his misgivings in an anonymous post in 2020 at PubPeer, an online forum where many scientists report potential research misconduct, and also contacted the journal’s editor. The journal pulled the paper, citing “falsified materials and/or data.”

“Science is hard enough as it is if people are actually being genuine and trying to do real work,” said Cackowski, who also works at the Karmanos Cancer Institute in Michigan.

Legitimate academic journals evaluate papers before publication by having other researchers in the field carefully read them over. But this peer review process is far from perfect. Reviewers volunteer their time, typically assume research is real and so don’t look for fraud.

Some publishers may try to pick reviewers they deem more likely to accept papers, because rejecting a manuscript can mean losing out on thousands of dollars in publication fees.

Worse, some corrupt scientists form peer review rings. Paper mills may create fake peer reviewers. Others may bribe editors or plant agents on journal editorial boards.

An ‘absolutely huge’ problem

It’s unclear when paper mills began to operate at scale. The earliest suspected paper mill article retracted was published in 2004, according to the Retraction Watch database, which details retractions and is operated by The Center for Scientific Integrity, the parent nonprofit of Retraction Watch.

An analysis of 53,000 papers submitted to six publishers – but not necessarily published – found 2% to 46% suspect submissions across journals. The American publisher Wiley, which has retracted more than 11,300 articles and closed 19 heavily affected journals in its erstwhile Hindawi division, said its new paper mill detection tool flags up to 1 in 7 submissions.

As many as 2% of the several million scientific works published in 2022 were milled, according to Adam Day, who directs Clear Skies, a company in London that develops tools to spot fake papers. Some fields are worse than others: biology and medicine are closer to 3%, and some subfields, such as cancer, may be much larger, Day said.

The paper mill problem is “absolutely huge,” said Sabina Alam, director of Publishing Ethics and Integrity at Taylor & Francis, a major academic publisher. In 2019, none of the 175 ethics cases escalated to her team was about paper mills, Alam said. Ethics cases include submissions and already published papers. “We had almost 4,000 cases” in 2023, she said. “And half of those were paper mills.”

Jennifer Byrne, an Australian scientist who now heads up a research group to improve the reliability of medical research, testified at a July 2022 U.S. House of Representatives hearing that nearly 6% of 12,000 cancer research papers screened had errors that could signal paper mill involvement. Byrne shuttered her cancer research lab in 2017 because genes she had spent two decades researching and writing about became the target of fake papers.

In 2022, Byrne and colleagues, including two of us, found that suspect genetics research, despite not immediately affecting patient care, informs scientists’ work, including clinical trials. But publishers are often slow to retract tainted papers, even when alerted to obvious fraud. We found that 97% of the 712 problematic genetics research articles we identified remained uncorrected.

Potential solutions

The Cochrane Collaboration has a policy excluding suspect studies from its analyses of medical evidence and is developing a tool to spot problematic medical trials. And publishers have begun to share data and technologies among themselves to combat fraud, including image fraud.

Technology startups are also offering help. The website Argos, launched in September 2024 by Scitility, an alert service based in Sparks, Nevada, allows authors to check collaborators for retractions or misconduct. Morressier, a scientific conference and communications company in Berlin, offers research integrity tools. Paper-checking tools include Signals, by London-based Research Signals, and Clear Skies’ Papermill Alarm.

But Alam acknowledges that the fight against paper mills won’t be won as long as the booming demand for papers remains.

Today’s commercial publishing is part of the problem, Byrne said. Cleaning up the literature is a vast and expensive undertaking. “Either we have to monetize corrections such that publishers are paid for their work, or forget the publishers and do it ourselves,” she said.

There’s a fundamental bias in for-profit publishing: “We pay them for accepting papers,” said Bodo Stern, a former editor of the journal Cell and chief of Strategic Initiatives at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a nonprofit research organization and funder in Chevy Chase, Maryland. With more than 50,000 journals on the market, bad papers shopped around long enough eventually find a home, Stern said.

To prevent this, we could stop paying journals for accepting papers and look at them as public utilities that serve a greater good. “We should pay for transparent and rigorous quality-control mechanisms,” he said.

Peer review, meanwhile, “should be recognized as a true scholarly product, just like the original article,” Stern said. And journals should make all peer-review reports publicly available, even for manuscripts they turn down.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. This is a condensed version. To learn more about how fraudsters around the globe use paper mills to enrich themselves and harm scientific research, read the full version.

Frederik Joelving, Contributing editor, Retraction Watch; Cyril Labbé, Professor of Computer Science, Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA), and Guillaume Cabanac, Professor of Computer Science, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Charles J. Russo, University of Dayton

The Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether Oklahoma can open St. Isidore: an online Roman Catholic charter school named after the patron saint of the internet. If affirmed, the school would be the nation’s first faith-based charter – a sea change in education law, expanding the boundaries of government aid to faith-based schools.

On Jan. 24, 2025, the justices agreed to hear two consolidated cases: Oklahoma Charter School Board v. Drummond and St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond. Gentner Drummond, the state’s attorney general, filed suit in 2023 to block the school’s contract. In Oklahoma’s courts, Drummond argued that St. Isidore’s creation would violate state statutes, Oklahoma’s Constitution and the U.S. Constitution – and the Supreme Court of Oklahoma agreed with the attorney general.

The ruling involving St. Isidore “stands to be one of the most significant religious and education freedom decisions in our lifetime,” noted Oklahoma’s Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt, who backs the school. Opponents such as Drummond, another Republican, fear just the opposite: that a judgment in favor of St. Isidore would threaten religious liberty by allowing closer ties between the government and religious organizations.

Indeed, St. Isidore is a potential blockbuster. At stake is whether, or how far, the Supreme Court may continue to expand the boundaries of permissible government aid to faith-based institutions and their students – a trend I have often written about in my work on education law.

Testing the limits

In a trio of recent cases, the majority of justices held that states cannot deny institutions or individuals generally available aid based solely on their religions. The first, decided in 2017, dealt with a Lutheran church applying for grants to enhance playground protection in a preschool and child care facility in Missouri. The court reached similar conclusions about an educational tax-credit program in Montana, and providing tuition assistance to parents in districts lacking public secondary schools in Maine.

This time around, the justices will face two key questions. First, do the teachings of “a privately owned and run school constitute state action simply because it contracts with the state”? In other words, is a charter school a state actor?

Second, the justices will weigh how the First Amendment religion clauses apply to a faith-based charter school. According to the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The question is whether a state violates the free exercise clause by excluding schools from the charter program “solely because they are religious.” If so, is the exclusion justified by concerns about the government “establishing” religion?

Key arguments

The first issue – the “state actor” question – essentially asks whether a state-funded school teaching Catholicism would constitute the government promoting a religion, in violation of the First Amendment prohibition against doing so.

Drummond, Oklahoma’s attorney general, argues that St. Isidore “misuses the concept of religious liberty by employing it as a means to justify state-funded religion.” The state’s “charter schools bear all of the hallmarks of a public school,” such as being entirely state-funded, he wrote in a brief to the Supreme Court. Thus, as a government actor, St. Isidore may not promote religion or one religion over another.

This “state actor” argument may be difficult for St. Isidore’s proponents to rebut. Yet, supporters of St. Isidore have an ace in the hole: that trio of recent Supreme Court opinions expanding the boundaries of aid to faith-based schools and their students.

In the first of the trilogy – the 2017 playground case from Missouri – Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that excluding the Christian child care center “from a public benefit for which it is otherwise qualified, solely because it is a church, is odious to our Constitution all the same, and cannot stand.”

Roberts authored the opinions in all three of those cases, which reflect the dominant view of the court in recent years: the accommodationist wing. Accommodationists tend to take the position that the First Amendment promotes cooperation between religion and government, so long as the government does not favor a particular religion.

However, the justices’ support for faith-based charter schools may not prove as strong. One reason is that previous cases expanding permissible aid to religious organizations have used what is called the child-benefit test: The students or their parents, rather than the institutions themselves, like St. Isidore, are the primary beneficiaries of the government funds.

Another factor is that Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who has joined the majority in previous decisions increasing aid to faith-based schools and their students, recused herself from participating in the decision over whether to hear the dispute over St. Isidore. She did not say why, and it remains to be seen whether she will take part in its resolution.

In the earlier cases, the five accommodationist justices – led by Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, along with Roberts, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh – supported increased aid. The remaining three justices – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – are less likely to support St. Isidore’s position. Thus, St. Isidore’s supporters may have little wiggle room.

What’s next?

St. Isidore is a potential game changer, because it may expand the limits of aid to faith-based schools and their students more than ever before.

If the court does uphold the creation of St. Isidore, the full implications remain to be seen. This much appears clear: Other states may follow suit, further blurring the line between church and state.

A decision in the school’s favor could have other consequences, as well. One issue Oklahoma’s courts considered was whether St. Isidore had to admit and serve students with disabilities. By state law, charter schools are required to, but critics argued that St. Isidore failed to demonstrate that it would.

Nonpublic schools, on the other hand, have no legal duty to admit particular students, including those with disabilities. When they do attend nonpublic schools, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and its regulations require local public school boards to fund some services. But that amount is limited, with the upshot that faith-based schools often are not equipped to serve students with disabilities.

If the court were to uphold the creation of St. Isidore, I believe the ruling could provide the impetus for Congress and the federal Department of Education to modify these laws to increase funding for children with disabilities at faith-based schools.

As I learned in law school, “the Supreme Court does not take cases to affirm them.” That lesson, combined with the court’s three most recent cases on religion and schools, suggests more change may be in the offing when the justices issue their decision – likely in late June.

Charles J. Russo, Joseph Panzer Chair in Education and Research Professor of Law, University of Dayton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Dyana Mason, University of Oregon and Mirae Kim, George Mason University

On Jan. 27, 2025, the Trump administration ordered a freeze on federal grants and contracts covering a wide array of aid programs to take effect at . This freeze was partially prevented when a judge responded to a lawsuit filed by the National Council of Nonprofits and other organizations. The flow of funds on grants that had already been awarded was at least temporarily protected by the judge’s action. The attorneys general of 22 states and the District of Columbia have also sued to block this funding freeze.

The Trump administration, which on Jan. 29 rescinded the memo ordering the funding suspension, has made clear that it may again seek to reduce or eliminate much of the money, totaling several hundred billion dollars, that funds many services that nonprofits provide, such as support for foster parents, after-school care and distributing food for free.

Dyana Mason and Mirae Kim, two scholars of nonprofits, explain the role that federal funding plays in the nonprofit sector.

How much do nonprofits rely on federal funding?

Nonprofits partner with the government to deliver social services, such as child care for low-income families, housing for people experiencing homelessness, and job training and placement. These partnerships can form with local or state governments, as well as with the federal government, with this collaboration mostly taking place through grants and contracts.

Government funding makes up about 33% of the revenue flowing into the nonprofit sector annually, according to the Urban Institute. The institute, a think tank, also found that nearly 40% of all nonprofits in the United States applied for federal grants in 2021, 2022 and 2023, and that about 10% applied for federal contracts. The share of government funding can be far larger for some kinds of social service nonprofits.

Many other nonprofits applied for local and state grants during that three-year period. Those grants, however, are often themselves funded by the federal government indirectly through grants it makes to state and local government agencies. Those agencies, in turn, then provide grants or maintain contracts with local nonprofits to provide services.

Although it’s hard to track with absolute precision due to those complex arrangements, government revenue is the second-largest source of income for nonprofits after the money these organizations and institutions earn through commercial activities.

Also called “fee-for-service,” this revenue includes the money nonprofit hospitals get when patients and insurers pay medical bills, nonprofit theaters receive when they sell tickets to performances, and nonprofit private schools obtain when parents pay tuition.

Some social service nonprofits charge fees too, typically on a sliding scale. That is, their clients with relatively higher incomes pay more, and those with extremely low incomes pay very little or nothing at all.

How could freezing federal funding affect nonprofits?

We have no doubt that a long freeze on federal grants and contracts would be devastating for nonprofits and the communities they serve.

For example, Meals on Wheels, a program that delivers hot meals to more than 2 million homebound people over 65 and helps them maintain social connections, gets 37% of its funding from the federal government.

Clackamas Women’s Services, a domestic and sexual violence organization based near Portland, Oregon, is one of the many local organizations that have expressed concern about what to expect. The group says it could lose half of its annual budget if federal funding were to be eliminated.

Without federal funding, organizations like these – many of which already have waitlists – would have to cut back on the services they provide.

What’s the role of nonprofits in the US safety net?

It’s very significant.

For the past several decades, attempts to scale back the size of the government have led to government agencies essentially hiring nonprofits to do much of their work.

Through contracts and grants, nonprofits then do such things as assist people who are recovering from fires, hurricanes and other disasters; provide services for veterans and active-duty members of the military; and help people with mental health conditions, including substance use problems, just to name a few.

This arrangement typically provides nonprofits with a reliable and predictable source of funds that they can use to serve their communities. But it can also leave them vulnerable to policy changes – especially when new administrations take over, as the second Trump administration’s actions illustrate.

Research we conducted about what happened to nonprofits during the COVID-19 pandemic showed that volatility in the economy has serious effects on the ability of nonprofits to do their work.

For example, social service nonprofits struggled in March and April 2020 due to falling revenue at a time of increasing demand. Many of these organizations had to scale back their services. In some cases, they canceled them.

We followed up with another survey in November and December 2020. By then, we found, 61% of the groups had received forgivable federal loans through the government’s Paycheck Protection Program.

Nearly half of the nonprofits told us that they had, in addition, received other forms of emergency funding from the federal government, including Economic Injury Disaster Loans and emergency food distributions.

This federal assistance made it possible for thousands of nonprofits to keep their staff employed and continue to provide important services as the economy recovered.

What happens when nonprofits lose federal funds?

It’s hard for social service organizations to replace federal funding.

Nonprofits can, of course, appeal to their donors to help bridge the gap. But donations from individuals, foundations, corporations and bequests only amount to no more than 15% of the funds flowing into the nonprofit sector.

The outcome of freezing, eliminating or scaling back federal funding for nonprofits would mean that those in need would get fewer services. We would also expect mass layoffs, which could harm the U.S. economy.

Nonprofits employ more than 12 million people in the United States. That’s more workers than big industries such as construction, transportation and finance employ. Should millions of them suddenly become unemployed, demand would grow further for social services from providers already unable to meet lower levels of demand due to funding cuts.

Has there ever been upheaval like this before?

Congress appropriates money to provide for the services that the public needs and demands. These moves have led to great fear and uncertainty among organizations that serve people in need in the United States and abroad.

Although it’s not unusual for funding priorities to change from one administration to the next, Donald Trump’s executive orders on international aid and nonprofit grants and contracts that underpin the U.S. safety net are unprecedented.

Dyana Mason, Associate Professor of Planning, Public Policy and Management, University of Oregon and Mirae Kim, Associate Professor of Nonprofit Studies, George Mason University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.