Did a criminal Russian academic paper mill use AI to plagiarize a BYU professor and his student?

The academic theft was so shameless that Brigham Young University biology professor Sam Payne couldn’t process what he saw on his computer screen.
The academic journal BioSystems had asked Payne to provide a peer review of a paper relevant to his own bioinformatics research, but the moment Payne began to read it he realized the paper wasn’t just related to his work, he believed it literally was his work. Some of the data tables were identical to his own.
“I was so surprised that I had to double check that it was really what I had thought,” he told the Deseret News. “When I read the paper, I first went to talk to my graduate student Hannah Boekweg, who was the lead author of the paper being plagiarized. Even when I described it to her, I was worried that I was somehow mistaken.
“It was so brazen, so clearly plagiarized. I just needed secondary confirmation that this was really happening.”
Payne alerted BioSystems, which rejected the paper in March. But in July, Payne found a reworked version of his and Boekweg’s paper had been published in the journal Proteomics under the names of five other researchers.
This version was more sinister; it was Payne’s and Boekweg’s paper, but it used the third person. Payne believes it was run through an artificial intelligence filter to foil plagiarism checkers.
“I immediately recognized that this was a con and it would be really damaging to science more than it would be to me personally,” Payne said. “My first real reaction was trying to figure out who to contact to get this retracted. Luckily I was able to get in touch with the editor of Proteomics and notify them about the situation.”
A BYU colleague put him in touch with the journal’s parent company, Wiley Publishing.
“Being able to talk to Wiley and their Research Integrity Unit really helped me not be too worried/scared/upset,” Payne said in an email. “I understood their process and was trusting that it would get resolved. If I had been alone in this, it would have been a much different story. But I did not feel helpless. I would say that I was very fortunate and am grateful for my colleagues who helped me find the connections.”
A Wiley spokesperson told Nature magazine, “This paper was simultaneously submitted to multiple journals and included plagiarized images,” adding that, “Our investigation confirmed that systematic manipulation of the publication process was at play.”
So, who stole Payne’s and Boekweg’s work?
The short answer is we may never know, but the hunt for the academic thieves highlighted a major problem in academic publishing.
Proteomics retracted the paper and published a statement that said it had contacted four of the five authors, who said they “did not participate in the writing and submission of the article and gave no consent for publication.” The fifth didn’t respond.
“I don’t know any of the authors, and the situation is still not totally clear as to what actually happened,” Payne told the Deseret News. “In the retraction, several authors say that they were unaware of this paper — including the person listed as the contact author. This is a rather confusing scenario. So it’s not clear to me that we really know what happened.”
Nature magazine published an article about Payne’s plight and its own investigation into what happened. Nature said its news team found links between several of the listed authors and a company called International Publisher, an academic paper mill in Moscow.
International Publisher’s website advertises a selection of more than 10,000 manuscripts, Nature reported, and researchers can pay $500 to $3,000 to be listed as one of the authors of a reworked paper.
Brian Perron, a professor of social work at the University of Michigan who also works as what Nature called a misconduct sleuth, told the magazine that the allegedly plagiarized papers carried several signs of paper-mill articles, including that fact they were submitted to Biosystems and Proteomics in close proximity. (Nature has reported about these hallmarks in the past.)
Payne had previously had a student work on methods to detect fraud and once gave a talk himself about detecting data manipulation, but AI text re-phrasing was new to him.
Payne said that as disconcerting as it was for him and Boekweg, the incident provided an opportunity for academics to consider reform.
He praised Biosystems for quickly rejecting the paper when he discovered the fraud, but he was certain it would be submitted to other journals and tried to learn whether the academic journal had a way to warn other journals that a fraudulent paper existed.
“First, we need a better way to detect fraud” he said. “Because this is a re-phrase of text, it evades plagiarism checkers. We need a much better method for finding fraud.
“Second, we need a better way to deal with fraud. Our current system is not able to handle many scenarios. I’m not an expert here, but hope that publishers take a serious look at their stewardship.
“Third, we need to address the root of the problem. Ultimately this is not a problem of technology, but a problem of integrity.”
Payne said the situation reminded him of a statement made by the President Spencer W. Kimball of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 1975, he gave what is called “The Second Century Address” for the centennial of BYU.
“Much misery results from flaws in character, not from failures in technology,” President Kimball said.
“Education needs to include teaching integrity,” Payne said. “This is one area where BYU has an advantage, (with) our dual heritage and … consistent emphasis to fulfill both an academic and religious mission.”
The original paper by Payne, Boekweg and three others was published in 2021 in Molecular and Cellular Proteomics.
“As single cell proteomics is a new field, we created a method for this simulation and demonstrated how to appropriately design an experiment,” Payne said.