The following guest post by the papermill hunter Nick Wise will introduce you to a small (and apparently not overly successful) Ukrainian papermill located in London, and its owner Prof Dr Svetlana Drobyazko who conveniently acts as Special Issue editor at MDPI.

We all heard of russian papermills (read for example here), but you will forgive me for not giving much of a toss about corruption in russia and the state of rascist science. But I do want Ukraine not only to win this war, but also to become a modern, liberal and prosperous country, and every little counts.

So let’s crack down on Ukrainian papermills then. Before I pass the metaphorical mic over to Nick Wise, here is another Ukrainian papermill which a Ukrainian reader informed me about.

While many Ukrainian men fight on the front to defend their country, certain young fellows named Denis Pilipenko (Denys Pylypenko, Денис Пилипенко) and Denys Kovalenko (Денис Коваленко) brought their papermilling business “Scientific Publications” to safety and continue selling to you papers and citations. On every field of research:

“Our company employs many specialists in various scientific areas, we do not focus on a particular specialisation. Notably, 80 % of our publications are studies on chemistry, physics, mathematics, biology, economics, law, medicine, ecology, pedagogy, and other related branches of these sciences.”

The prices start at $900, including “Editing of material“, “Selection of the journal for publication“, “Publication control” and “Negotiating with editors and reviewers“.

The Kyiv-based company Scientific Alliance and its subsiduary «Наукові публікації» (Scientific Publications) was founded by Pilipenko in 2016, specialising on catering to academic customers in Ukraine, russia, but also in Kazakhstan and other post-Soviet countries. Pilipenko is very proud of his Kazakhstan success:

“We have clients who went to defend their scientific works with our support, and many of them already have scientific degrees, titles and high positions. They went through a long career path together with our company, and we are excited about this. […] We decided to take over one of the most serious competitors in Central Asia, namely the “World Sci Publ”.

Sounds like he is sad about not having same success in Ukraine? Pilipenko and Kovalenko openly advertise their papermilling and citation rigging business in Ukraine through their own magazine “Science and Metrics“. In 2019 they also started to offer scamferences, and to bribe, pardon, to sponsor Crossref. However, his predatory journal “Научные журналы” (Scientific Journals) was delisted by Scopus, which Pilipenko laments in his interview to himself. At least two Ukrainian university rectors signed “cooperation” agreements with Pilipenko’s papermill, as the company proudly announced in press releases in 2021 and 2022 while inviting you to “Order the publication of scientific article in high-rated journal right now“, with a button to click. Yes, Ukrainian academia needs to be cleaned with an iron broom from its post-Soviet rot. Here photographic proof:

When the full-scale russian aggression war started, the two brave young men fearlessly announced not to sell to russians anymore, fled Kyiv and announced to serve their country by papermilling from an undisclosed location – allegedly in Lviv in western Ukraine, as Pilipenko explained in an interview. Or maybe they did manage to leave Ukraine? In any case, Pilipenko and Kovalenko opened (most likely virtual) international franchises in Poland, Latvia, Azerbaijan, Albania and Uzbekistan. From those national websites, our two heroes openly sell papermilled manuscripts and rigged citations, while many Ukrainian scientists are fighting and dying on the front. I wonder if these two Ukrainian entrepreneurs work with Iranian partners to deliver the papermilling services, it would certainly make perfect sense.

Pilipenko (who connected to me via LinkedIn but did not reply to questions) also claims that he set up a charitable foundation to donate to the Ukrainian Army. These people truly have no shame.

Update: turns out, the papermill sleuth Anna Abalkina described the Pilipenko papermill in a preprint Abalkina & Bishop 2022, as “Tanu.pro: an example of a paper mill in psychology“. No less than a hundred of tanu.pro forgeries were found by Abalkina, some of them submitted using pseudo-academic made-up email addresses with domains registered to Denis Pilipenko’s brother, Maksim Pilipenko (portrayed here as the CEO of Scientific Publications). The responsible special issue editor at the Wiley journal Review of Education was Lyudmilla Mashtaler, affiliated with the Pilipenko business.

And now, another Ukrainian papermill brought to you by Nick Wise:

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MDPI, Special Issues and The European Academy of Sciences Ltd

By Nick Wise

Recently, someone pointed me to a website called Scientific Publication Service. Their ‘About Us’ section states that:

“SPS is a group of enthusiasts consisting of scientists, researchers, editors, designers, whose goal is to unite scientists of various scientific fields for sharing the Article Processing Charge (APC).

We also help authors and journal editors in manuscripts preparing: manuscript formatting, Graphical Abstract design, journal cover design, Call for Papers poster design, Social and Email Marketing for academics’ involvement.”

As well as offering various formatting and journal recommendation services, the first tab on the website is for ‘Co-Authorship’. The website says that you can join an article as a co-author and your collected fees will pay for the article processing charge (APC). They offer guaranteed publication or your money back and complete confidentiality (citation needed).

The table below shows the current article list, dated the 14th of August 2023. We’re told the subject area and keywords of the article, the quartiles and indices for the intended journal, an intended submission date, and the costs for the different authorship positions. As may be expected, higher quartile journals and more senior authorship positions command higher prices. All positions are over $500, except the one for a ‘British publisher’.

The ‘Contact Us’ section of the website offers little information, only an email address and a Telegram channel, Scopus_Today. That channel, created on the 8th of December 2019, has 940 subscribers as of this article and posts almost exclusively the link to the article list from the website when it is updated.

However, occasionally it posts particular papers in an effort to sell the final position. For example, recently it posted (left) trying to sell the 1st and 2nd author positions on the top paper on the current authorship list, and was clearly successful with the 2nd position. 

Back in February 2022 it shared the post on the right, trying to sell the final authorship position. According to Dimensions, there is only one paper that has been published with the phrase ‘global customs space’ in the title or abstract. It is ‘Modeling the Risks of the Global Customs Space’ in MDPI’s Journal of Risk and Financial Management, from a special issue edited by Prof. Dr. Svetlana Drobyazko, whose affiliation is given as The European Academy of Sciences Ltd.

Her Google Scholar page likewise gives her role as ‘Doctor of Economics, Professor, President of The European Academy of Sciences Ltd, London, UK’, with a verified email at ‘conferencii.com’. She could also give her affiliation as the Academy of Economic Science of Ukraine, the Russian Academy of Natural History, or indeed the Department of Finance and Accounting of the Institute of Economics and Management of “Ukraine” University which, whatever it’s quality, is a real institution with staff and students.

[The Open International University of Human Development “Ukraine” is described by my Ukrainian reader as a “trashy private university” and basically, as a diploma mill. The institute where Drobyazko is faculty member does no research, it lists some lecture courses by Drobyazko, e.g. on topics of occupational health and professional ethics, and informs us of the birthdays of its faculty members. Drobyazko’s birthday is 30 December 1975. -LS]

For those not familiar with The European Academy of Sciences Ltd (not to be confused with the European Academy of Sciences, an organisation with a much longer history), this esteemed institution is a company that was registered in the UK on the 23rd of May 2019 by a Svitlana Drobiazko, whose correspondence address is given as ‘4 Zaporizhske Shose., App. 40, Dnipro, Ukraine, 49107’. The company’s nature of business includes ‘Publishing of consumer and business journals and periodicals’, ‘Research and experimental development on social sciences and humanities’ and ‘Post-graduate level higher education’. I believe that Svitlana Drobiazko, the only officer of the company, and Prof. Dr. Svetlana Drobyazko are one and the same person.

[“Svitlana” is the Ukrainian version of the russian name “Svetlana”. For whatever reasons, Drobyazko acts internationally using the russian version of her name. -LS]

The institution’s address is given as ‘71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, England, WC2H 9JQ’, though anyone hoping to visit the offices of the academy may be disappointed. There are 7,044 active companies registered at 71-75 Shelton Street, so it must be quite cosy.

What about ‘conferencii.com’, Drobyazko’s verified email address from Google Scholar? This is an organiser of conferences, whose archives suggest that they have been operating since 2018, with conferences every couple of months across Europe as well as the USA and Canada. The most recent conference, titled ‘THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE:

INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH, EDUCATION AND INNOVATION’ was hosted in London in June 2023 and features 6 papers in the proceedings. Most of the papers are broadly in the realm of finance, business and international relations, apart from ‘Improving the effectiveness in the complex treatment of periostitis of the jaws with the use of drugs decasan and stomorad’. I hope all the authors got what they needed from the conference.

The conference proceedings also give the editorial board, headed up again by Svetlana Drobyazko of The European Academy of Sciences Ltd as editor-in-chief. The other 21 editors, outnumbering the authors by nearly 2 to 1, are primarily from Eastern European universities, with a few from Asia. If you would like to attend the next conference, it’s hosted by The European Academy of Sciences Ltd in London on the 23rd and 24th of October, though the conference itself will be remote.

There is also a VKontakte page called Scopus Today which, as well as pointing to the Telegram channel and conferencii.com, links to a journal called Economics and Finance. Its address is given as The European Academy of Sciences Ltd in the same Covent Garden office, and the editorial board is the same as for the conferences with Svetlana Drobyazko at the top. I believe that this is the ‘British journal’ with much cheaper prices for authorship shown in the article list above. If you would like to send in your own article to the journal rather than buying a position on one, the APC is £100 and covers the costs of ‘peer review, copyediting, typesetting, long-term archiving, and journal management’. Paying peer reviewers?! A clear sign that this is not a legitimate journal from a trusted publisher.

Returning to MDPI, how successful is the special issue scheme? Not particularly. Including the SI mentioned previously, Drobyazko is the sole guest editor of 4 MDPI special issues:

• Social, Economic, Legal and Educational Challenges of Network Economics, Journal of Risk and Financial Management, closed 31/12/22, 5 papers
• Social Risks of Sustainable Development in the Security System, Sustainability, closed 01/01/23, 0 papers
• Development of Social Studies in the Knowledge Society: Social, Economic, Legal and Educational Challenges, Social Sciences, closed 31/12/22, 4 papers
• Mechanisms and Models of Risk Management, Journal of Risk and Financial Management, deadline 29/08/23, 9 papers

With a maximum of only 18 papers across 4 special issues, Drobyazko can hardly be accused of milking her position as both guest editor and authorship salesperson. I should also make clear that I have only matched the paper on the ‘global customs space’ to an advert. All the other papers in the special issues could have been submitted legitimately, by authors unaware that the guest editor had made themselves professor of an institution that they founded and was trying to sell authorship of papers in the issues.

I do not believe the small number of papers is for lack of trying, it’s just that the authorship positions are very slow to sell. Some previous article lists are available on the Telegram channel, allowing us to see that positions 2-4 were available for the paper with code 594395 on the 10th of October 2022, with an intended submission date in December 2022. Yet on the most recent article list the paper is still there, with no more positions sold. Similarly, the article above with code 734315 also appeared on the 10th of October 2022 and 10th of August 2023, but has just managed to sell the final position.

Prof. Dr. Svetlana Drobyazko, The European Academy of Sciences Ltd and Scientific Publication Service are a symptom, not a cause, of the current problems in academic publishing. The fact that the company does not appear to be very successful at selling authorships and publishing papers in the special issues is not thanks to MDPI, who clearly do not perform the most basic checks on who can be a guest editor. For around £50, anyone can register a company in the UK (£12), pretend to have an office in London (£39), claim to be a professor and start proposing special issues to MDPI. I suspect that Drobyazko is not the only person doing this and, whilst MDPI care only about increasing their publication numbers, who’s to stop them.

[Drobyazko did not reply to my email when invited to comment on her business activities. -LS]

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