Hidden hydras: uncovering the massive footprint of one paper mill’s operations

At the heart of any paper mill’s operations sits an unavoidable contradiction. On the one hand, paper mills must keep their operations clandestine lest they be discovered and have their clients’ articles retracted en masse. On the other, paper mills must make themselves visible to some degree to attract new customers. For instance, advertisements for paper mills abound on services like WhatsApp and Telegram. This contradiction makes it difficult for researchers like us who study systematic fraud to get a full sense of the scope of any paper mill’s operations. By charting the web presence of one shady business, we sought to do just that.

About a year ago, we began probing search engines with queries a scientist desperate for publications might make: “authorship for sale,” “call for co-authors,” “scopus-indexed publications,” “guaranteed journal acceptance,” etc. We figured paper mills would litter their pages with these phrases in a bid to be easily found by customers. Sure enough, one of our first searches directed us to the front page of the Academic Research and Development Association (ARDA), based in Chennai, India.

ARDA presents itself as a professional organization that offers services including “Conferences and Meetings”, “Journal Publications” and “Article Writing Services”. ARDA also maintains lists of indexed journals in which it can guarantee publication, along with guidelines on how long acceptance should take and instructions to limit plagiarism to a journal-specific threshold. All of these journals claim to be peer-reviewed on their own websites. Many of the titles listed on ARDA’s site are well-known hijacked journals already found on the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker. Other journals, such as the International Journal of Early Childhood Special Education and the Journal of Pharmaceutical Negative Results, are favorites of authors from Saveetha Dental College, a school caught inflating its rankings in a large self-citation scheme. 

We sent an inquiry about prices for publication in February 2023, for which they quoted us US$250 to US$450 per article, depending on our journal of interest.

In April 2023, ARDA began to list a handful of journals from the same publisher, Technoarete Publishing, on its website. Technoarete Publishing is owned by Technoarete Group, which shares its CEO, Rudra Bhanu Satpathy, and street address with ARDA. Technoarete has several subsidiaries (e.g. the Institute for Engineering Research and Publication, or IFERP, BioLeagues, and United Innovators) that also offer publishing services on their websites, listing many of the same journals as ARDA does on its website.

This discovery convinced us that ARDA represents just the tip of the iceberg. By searching for other entities, first through direct links (e.g. a parent company publicly listing its subsidiaries) and then through more subtle indicators (e.g. businesses that shared the same address or phone number), we uncovered a network of associations consisting of 828 distinct businesses, journals, publishers, individuals, universities, professional societies and indexing services.

Several of these businesses (such as the Institute for Scientific and Engineering Research and World Academics) have websites that are almost identical in layout and function to ARDA’s, offering article writing and publication in many of the same journals. Many websites shared Technoarete’s declaration that they were the “World’s largest Non-profitable [sic] professional association registered under India Trust Act(1882)”.

BioLEAGUES, a Technoarete subsidiary, appears to oversee at least eight different professional societies, including the Asia Pacific Association for Dental and Oral Health (APADENTO) and the Universal Society of Food and Nutrition (USFN). Like BioLEAGUES, the websites of these professional societies also advertise publication in indexed journals.

These professional societies also organize conferences that give out ‘Best Paper’ awards to attending academics. Several of the award recipients publish frequently in journals including the International Journal of Early Childhood Special Education and the Journal of Pharmaceutical Negative Results, looping us back to ARDA. Until September 2024, BioLEAGUES also controlled an official ‘channel’ in the Springer Nature journal Cureus, the world’s largest medical journal by annual publication volume, which allows BioLEAGUES to appoint its own editorial officers and handle its own submissions to Cureus. This channel published at least 131 articles between February 2023 and September 2024.

Several of the websites presented themselves as dashboards where academics might find upcoming conferences, with names like Conference Next, All Conference Alert, and International Conference Alerts. Upon closer inspection, these thousands of conferences hardly appeared to be real. Many could be taking place in multiple countries on the same day, or could be one of 10 conferences organized on the same day by ‘Jeff Jones’ or ‘Emma Davis’. They could even be taking place within an active war zone; in August 2022, Conference Next advertised dozens of upcoming international conferences in Kharkiv, Ukraine amidst Russian missile strikes on the city. In fact, these websites seemed to be able to offer conferences in whatever major city users could search.

Our investigation also led us to IFERP, another Technoarete subsidiary which reported Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) with at least 17 different universities in four countries for ‘Publications’ or ‘Journal Publications’. We located one such MOU between IFERP and the Bharat Institute of Engineering and Technology (BIET) in which IFERP guarantees to publish 30 to 50 papers from a conference organized by BIET in one of nine Scopus-indexed journals. The 2021 conference wound up hosting 118 papers. We found several papers from this conference that were published in the Turkish Journal of Computer and Mathematics Education, a hijacked journal de-indexed by Scopus effective 2020 and listed by ARDA until 2021.

Several businesses had bulk request forms for article writing and publication on their website. One stated on its FAQ page that if a journal gets de-indexed by Scopus, it will publish the client’s article in a back-dated issue. This business also states they “offer authorship as well as multiple authorship options through our previous authors and upcoming authors who can fund themselves”. United Innovators, another Technoarete subsidiary, offers patent filing as a service, suggesting this network of associations extends into other areas of the scientific enterprise.

In summary, for every legitimate kind of scientific activity, be it publishing articles, organizing conferences and professional societies or patenting new technologies, we found an ARDA-affiliated organization selling a fake version of that activity. 

We sought comment from ARDA, Technoarete Group, IFERP, BioLEAGUES, and their CEO Rudra Bhanu Satpathy, but have not heard back. [See update at end of post.]

It appears the term ‘paper mill’ may fail to fully capture the diversity and scale of activities overseen by these hydra-like conglomerates. Moreover, the high-level view of these networks that we’ve unraveled suggests an extraordinary ability to adapt and the capability for aggressive growth – a picture of a resilient enterprise. With so many functionally identical business fronts operating concurrently, those operating the network need not worry if one business is identified publicly, one professional society shuts down or one journal is de-indexed; plenty will remain to fill its place. 

Veteran paper mill observers will be reminded of OMICS Group, a predatory publisher that was ordered to pay $50 million to the US government for deceptive business practices, but survives to this day through a series of loosely connected subsidiaries and spinouts.

Our quest to map out a full network of associations around one particular business revealed this business was just one head on a hidden hydra, ready to sprout two more if that head was lost. If paper mills and their ilk are as tenacious and robust as this example suggests, we should not settle for half-measures that can be easily evaded. Successfully fighting them will require the kind of large-scale coordination they themselves have displayed.

Update: On October 7,  Rudra Bhanu Satpath, CEO of ARDA and Technoarete Group, responded to our request for comment. Satpathy stated “ARDA provides Author Service by helping Academicians to proof read , review and edit article”. Regarding the guaranteed acceptance of articles, Satpathy clarified that “Acceptance” means “Reviewed by Internal Quality Assurance team to take a decision if article will be Accepted or not Accepted by our team .Acceptance from our end signifies – Accepted or Not accepted . If articles are accepted at pre submission Check we advice authors to move ahead for submission .” 

Satpathy claimed the websites Conference Next, All Conference Alert, and International Conference Alerts belong to third-party event publishers ARDA uses for promoting their own conferences. Satpathy also claimed the company is working to identify hijacked journals among the publishers that approach them for “collaboration” and that they did not understand why Scopus deindexed the Turkish Journal of Computer and Mathematics Education.

Reese Richardson is a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Biological Sciences at Northwestern University. Spencer Hong is a PhD candidate in Chemical and Biological Engineering at Northwestern University. Luís A Nunes Amaral is the Erastus Otis Haven Profesor of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics at Northwestern University.

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