Paper Mill Authorship for Sale: Dataset Exposes Global Market Priced From $56 to $5,631

A newly compiled dataset has quantified what many in academia have long suspected: fake authorship on research papers is available at nearly any price point. The dataset, called BuyTheBy, represents the first systematic attempt to map the commercial market for paper mill products, drawing from more than 18,000 text-based advertisements posted across social media platforms and dedicated paper mill websites.

Researchers assembled the dataset from seven distinct paper mill operations spanning India, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Latvia, Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan, with advertisements collected between March 2020 and April 2026. The pricing structure revealed significant variation based on geographic origin, with first author slots ranging from $56 to $5,631. More troubling, several advertisements in the dataset appeared to match papers subsequently published in targeted journals, with titles identical to those promoted in the original listings. This suggests at least some advertised products successfully made it through peer review.

The findings, detailed in a preprint submitted to arXiv, arrive amid ongoing concerns about the scale of paper mill activity in scientific publishing. While the dataset provides an unprecedented window into this underground market, experts caution that enforcement remains challenging. The sheer volume of advertisements, their geographic dispersion, and the sophistication of the operations complicate efforts to trace and shut down these services. Journals and publishers face mounting pressure to develop detection mechanisms, but the BuyTheBy researchers note that the economics of the paper mill industry make it a persistent rather than isolated problem.