On page 5, related to a company based in Latvia, the following is stated: "Our team has been publishing articles in scientific journals since 2012. We have published more than 12,650 articles. We are the market leader in implementing projects in co-authorship, proofreading, and publication of articles."
Knowing this, what have COPE and STM done to identify these 12,650+ articles to identify if they have valid authorship, undeclared acknowledgements to this service, or if they are paper mill products?
I was able to find that this Latvian company is a subsidiary of the Russian paper mill 'Nauchnoe Obozrenie'. I hypothesize that the claim of 12,650+ papers refers not only to a Latvian paper mill but also to papers originating from Nauchnoe Obozrenie. https://russian-science.info/en/
“COPE and STM undertook a study with Maverick Publishing Services in June 2022, using data from publishers, to understand the scale of the problem of paper mills.”
What data did COPE and STM obtain from publishers to undertake this study? Can COPE and STM make this data available to the pubic?
Which publishers exactly shared data? Can COPE and STM please provide a comprehensive list of the participating publishers?
If data included peer review reports and/or authors’ responses to peer reports, assuming that these were not open peer reports, did the publishers that shared this data, and COPE and STM, obtain explicit permission from the authors and peer reviewers to use that data?
Maverick Publishing Services indicates on its webpage [1] several COPE member publishers (Springer Nature, Elsevier, PLoS, etc.) as clients. Can Maverick Publishing Services, COPE and STM kindly confirm that all of those clients, i.e., the authors, have properly acknowledged Maverick Publishing Services in the acknowledgements of their papers.
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