"An investigation has identified more than 1,500 research articles produced by a network of Ukrainian companies that could be one of Europe's largest paper mills - businesses that produce fake or low-quality research papers and sell authorships. Anna Abalkina, a research-integrity sleuth and social scientist at the Free University of Berlin, discovered the paper mill in 2022 after spotting papers with author e-mail addresses that had domains that did not match the geographical locations of academic affiliations. She dubbed the paper mill 'Tanu.pro' after the most frequently used of these unusual domains."
"Abalkina later teamed up with Svetlana Kleiner, a research integrity officer at the publisher Springer Nature, who is based in Leiden, the Netherlands ( Nature 's news team is editorially independent of its publisher.) Together, they traced more than 60 suspicious e-mail domains that were linked to Tanu.pro and appeared among the author e-mails of 1,517 papers published between 2017 and 2025, listing more than 4,500 researchers affiliated with around 460 universities across 46 countries. The majority of authors were in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Russia."
"During her investigation into a number of peculiar e-mail domains that cropped up on hundreds of papers, Abalkina established that one of the domains was registered to a founder of a Kyiv-based company called Scientific Publications, which was established in 2016. On its website, Scientific Publications says that it offers services such as manuscript editing, translation and submission to journals that are indexed in Scopus and the Web of Science."
A network of Ukrainian companies produced at least 1,517 research papers between 2017 and 2025, listing more than 4,500 researchers affiliated with around 460 universities across 46 countries. The network used more than 60 suspicious e-mail domains, most frequently Tanu.pro, to list author contacts that did not match institutional locations. The majority of authors were based in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Russia. One linked domain was registered to a founder of Kyiv-based Scientific Publications, which offers manuscript editing, translation and submission services and claims to 'boost citations' and legally protect customers. Findings were presented at an international peer-review congress in Chicago.
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