Recently, however, reports of coordinated scientific fraud activities have increased. Some suggest that the ease of communication provided by the internet and open-access publishing have created the conditions for the emergence of entities—paper mills (i.e., sellers of mass-produced low quality and fabricated research), brokers (i.e., conduits between producers and publishers of fraudulent research), predatory journals, who do not conduct any quality controls on submissions—that facilitate systematic scientific fraud.
Here, we demonstrate through case studies that i) individuals have cooperated to publish papers that were eventually retracted in a number of journals, ii) brokers have enabled publication in targeted journals at scale, and iii), within a field of science, not all subfields are equally targeted for scientific fraud.