Overview
- Researchers unveiled BuyTheBy, a collection of about 18,700 ads from seven paper mills posted between 2020 and early April 2026 on social platforms and broker websites.
- Across the ads, prices for a first‑author slot ranged from roughly $56 to $5,631, with an average cost just over $1,030.
- Many ads name targets that matter for career credit, with Elsevier mentioned most among publishers and more than 12,000 ads touting Scopus indexing and over 5,000 citing Web of Science.
- Checks of advertised titles against the literature found dozens of apparent matches across major publishers and IEEE proceedings, though ad-to-paper links are not certain proof of a sale.
- Publishers are starting to act, with Springer Nature saying it will investigate flagged cases and others seeking the data, even as the dataset omits large markets like Iran and China and mills increasingly use AI and offer end‑to‑end submission services.