China’s supreme court calls for crack down on paper mills

China’s top court says businesses that write bogus manuscripts for payment should be punished

China’s highest court has called for a crack down on the activities of paper mills, businesses that churn out fraudulent or poor-quality manuscripts and sell authorships. Some researchers are cautiously optimistic that the court’s guidance will help curb the use of these services, while others think the impact will be minimal.

“This is the first time the supreme court has issued guidance on paper mills and on scientific fraud,” says Wang Fei, who studies research-integrity policy at Dalian University of Technology in China.

Paper mills sell suspect research and authorships to researchers who want journal articles to burnish their CVs. They are a significant contributor to overall research misconduct, particularly in China.

Last month, the the Supreme People’s Court published a set of guiding opinions on technology innovation. Among the list of 25 articles, one called for lower courts to crack down on ‘paper industry chains’, and for research fraud to be severely punished.

Over the past decade, the Chinese government has issued regulations and policies to deter researchers from committing misconduct, including the use of paper mills, and has directed research institutions to investigate and punish researchers involved. But paper mills have largely continued, says Yin Bo, a lawyer and criminal-justice researcher at China University of Political Science and Law, in Beijing.

“Paper mills are very popular in China and there is a very huge business” involving them, says Gengyan Tang, who studies research integrity in China at the University of Calgary, Canada.

The guidelines issued by the supreme court are very important and signal that the courts will contribute to creating a fairer research ecosystem, says Yin, who also runs an online course on research integrity at Beijing Normal University.

Growing caseload

There have been an increasing number of cases involving paper mills in lower courts. In a search of a public database of court judgments, Tang identified 41 cases involving ghostwriting services between 2013 and 2024. The reports, shared with Nature, include some civil cases involving contract disputes, such as researchers who paid for writing and other academic publishing services from paper mills or individuals who didn’t fulfil their contracts.

In response to the government’s goal of reducing research misconduct, the way in which the lower courts adjudicate cases involving paper mills has changed over the past decade, says Yin. Some six or seven years ago, the courts would have considered contracts signed with paper mills as valid and warranting protection, he says. But courts now deem them invalid, recognizing that these contracts violate standards of research integrity and a fair system of evaluation and promotion, as described in several government policies.

In one case from 2023, a salesperson for a media company contacted an academic on the Chinese social-media platform, WeChat to offer academic ghostwriting services. The salesperson wrote that the cost of getting an article published in an established Chinese journal within two months was 16,200 yuan (US$2,200), paid in three instalments. The salesperson guaranteed a ’plagiarism score’ of less than 10%, and a full refund if the article couldn’t be published.

But after receipt of the first instalment, the salesperson went silent. More than a year later, the academic took the company to court, where a judge deemed that since writing and distributing papers on behalf of someone else “violates the principles of academic integrity and public order and good morals”, the contract between the two parties was invalid. Therefore, the media company had to return the 6,000 yuan instalment it had received.

“In most instances, paper mills were simply required to refund the fees paid by researchers,” says Tang.

But in cases that were considered criminal because they involved fraud, public prosecutors took individuals offering academic writing and publishing services, with no intention of delivering, to court for scamming or deceiving researchers. In cases where fraud was involved, penalties were more severe and included fines or even prison sentences.

More severe punishments

Some of the harshest language in the supreme court’s guidance was reserved for paper mills, says Wang. As a result, she expects that “paper mills in China will be punished more severely”.