Attending STS NL 2026 in Enschede

I will be attending STS NL 2026 this April (from 14th to 17th) at the University of Twente in Enschede. I’m excited to present my work-in-progress research titled: “Research Integrity at Scale: Paper Mills, Screening Tools, and the Reconfiguration of Publishability”.

The abstract can be found in the conference program:

Paper mills—black market entities selling fraudulent authorship and/or manuscript content for publications in academic journals—are attracting growing attention as a major threat to research integrity. Building on earlier issues like ghostwriting and predatory journals, paper mills exploit vulnerabilities in academic publishing at scale, shifting the focus of scientific misconduct from individual misbehavior to systematic manipulation. This crisis has prompted coordinated responses from multiple stakeholder groups including publishers, research institutions, and funders, with interventions that are actively reshaping the field.

This research specifically examines how research integrity tools designed and developed to combat paper mills are reconfiguring the concept of “publishability”, as it is situated and performed within industrial scholarly communication infrastructures by automating and augmenting integrity checks within submission and editorial workflows. The study draws on a scoping review of empirical studies on paper mills focusing on their operational patterns and proposed countermeasures complemented by a document analysis of grey literature and industry materials that catalog their positioning and promotion of solutions.

Preliminary findings show that paper mill detection and screening tools are increasingly relying on AI-based automation, framed by vendors as scalable solutions that are also efficient, saving time and scarce resources for editorial and peer review efforts. As paper mills are also widely alleged to utilize generative AI, this dynamic fosters an AI arms race that generates a new commercial market in research integrity, where both paper mills and vendors of research integrity tools pursue business opportunities through technological innovations and hence co-constitute an emerging research integrity economy. This market-making process with the adoption of these tools within integrity and quality assurance systems in academic publishing not only reconfigures how publishability is operationalized, but also broader conceptions of research integrity and quality.

(Note: The last sentence of the abstract has been slightly modified from the original submission to fix a typo.)