Nobelists advertise for russian papermill?

Five Nobel Prize laureates gave online interviews to a russian papermill, which the papermill now uses for advertising on YouTube and elsewhere. One of these Nobelists was turned into an antivaxxer.

The papermill is called Big Time, I was alerted to its Nobel scams by Nick Wise, then Anna Abalkina provided me with most of the evidence presented below.

Big Time is actually owned by a Ukrainian man named Alex Zvansky, but Zvansky’s main market has always been russia.

The company was set up by Zvansky in Kyiv in 2017 and officially registered in January 2019, as Ukrainian online records show. It remains an active business in Ukraine, two Ukrainian universities are on record of having paid Big Time: the Sokolovsky National Institute of Soil Science and Agrochemistry in 2017 and the Maloya National Institute Institute of Therapy in 2021.

Also in 2019, Big Time was sued by an unhappy customer, because the company didn’t provide her with the paid publication in agreed time. Here is the Ukrainian court verdict from July 2021, the plaintiff’s claim was rejected, papermill won.

Client (Person 1) needs a paper, approaches a paper mill Big Time (Person 2), and concludes a contract. The paper is not published within the defined period of time, and Person 1 sues Person 2. The court decides to deny the claim. Paper mills are lucrative business #papermills pic.twitter.com/TlhMvsoD0B

— Anna Abalkina @abalkina.bsky.social (@AbalkinaAnna) September 3, 2024

Yet before russia’s full-scale war, Big Time always hid its Ukrainian origins. First, it pretended to be Polish, registered in Krakow. Possibly Zvansky bought the business off from someone: the original Polish website used to be wos-scopus.eu, it is defunct now. He turned his business to russia, Big Time pretended to be a russian company. Zvansky’s email account remains the same modestly named boss@big-time.pro

According to russian online records, Big Time was registered as a business in Moscow on 23 March 2018, i.e. even almost a year before its registration in Ukraine. The founder and sole employee was Zvansky. In January 2023, this russian company went into liquidation, which completed on 26 June 2023.

Presumably Zvansky had to close his russian office because there was no way for a Ukrainian to keep money in russia or transfer it to Ukraine when the full-scale war began in February 2022.

Therefore, Big Time is officially back in Ukraine. Although the “Ideological Inspirer & CEO” Zvansky himself is actually in Krakow in Poland and occasionally at a seaside town Ribamar in Portugal, serving his war-torn country by papermilling from cosy abroad. On 26 February 2022, he posted this “important announcement“, that Big Time was “forced to go on vacation until 15 March 2022” and will resume business afterwards. Presumably, this was because Zvansky was fleeing to Poland while calling everyone to “support our Legendary Armed Forces of Ukraine!“.

The business indeed continues, from Poland and Portugal. Here is a recent Ukrainian job posting by Big Time for a service manager (remote), from August 2024:

Note this sentence:

“Our work has received the trust of Nobel Prize laureates, university rectors and journal publishers themselves.”

We will get to that soon. The company used to openly offer authorships for sale (now they do it more discreetly), here is an archived post on the russian main page of Big Time (translated):

“Here you can leave your request to search for co-authors for joint publication in a scientific journal, or a series of journals. Most authors publish collectively in groups of 4-6 people, dividing expenses among themselves in this way. This in no way prejudices the participation in the publication of each of the authors, because Everyone’s participation is equal. This area of ​​scientific publications is quite popular; authors of scientific papers send us new topics every week for review and help in finding co-authors. And, the Big Time company successfully does this, and its activities in the field of finding co-authors and assistance in publication are confirmed by dozens of real reviews from our clients.”

The highlighted paper, where two authorships were on offer, was indeed published in some paywalled Indian write-only journal, under the same title as advertised, its “authors” spread all over russia:

USTINYA S. VASILEVA, ADELINA R. GALYAVEEVA, ALINA I. KHAERZAMANOVA, ALEXANDER N. RASIN, PAVEL N. KISLYY, LILIJA M. ALLANINA, ELIZAVETA S. KONEVA The Problem of Increasing Number of Myocardial Infarction: Deaths in Densely Populated Cities International Journal of Pharmaceutical Research (2020) doi: 10.31838/ijpr/2020.12.04.139 

Anna Abalkina noted on PubPeer:

“The paper has collaboration anomalies, i.e. multiple authors represent different organizations and some authors’ specialization doesn’t correspond to the paper’s topic.
According to Scopus, this paper has been cited 10 times. All 10 citing papers have corresponding emails associated with the Tanu.pro paper mill (including domains like @ubogazici.in, @politechnika.pro, @national-university.info, @nuos.pro, etc.). Of these, nine citations are from papers published in a 2021 special issue of the Journal of Intellectual Disability – Diagnosis and Treatment.”

Tanu.pro is in fact another Ukrainian papermill run by the Pilipenko brothers, also studied by Abalkina. Read about it here:

Recall that also Big Time uses the .pro domain (https://big-time.pro, boss@big-time.pro), maybe it is not a coincidence.

There is even a German franchise of Big Time, at a residential address in Karlsruhe, presumably at someone’s (Zvansky’s?) apartment, and a German website, informing of further offices in Portugal and Poland. The address in Portugal is clearly residential, showing private houses in Google Street View. Zvansky’s holiday home, maybe? The one in Krakow seems to show an old office building with a supermarket in the ground floor, and indeed, Zvansky and Big Time started in Krakow and then returned there when the full-scale war started.

There was a chat window, so I clicked that I was interested in publishing a paper.

They were immediately interested in helping me with my inquiry about an authorship on someone else’s paper on the topic of nanotechnology. I gave my phone number, and received phone calls from Portugal and Poland. But I can’t use phone calls, because phone recordings are legally not permitted in Germany. Then, someone named Vladimir contacted me via WhatsApp from Portugal.

I offered up to €500 to become an author on someone else’s nanotechnology paper, and stipulated that I wish no predatory journals or later retractions for plagiarism. “Vladimir” was definitely willing to make an offer but reluctant to give any information out in writing. He insisted on having a phone call. Which I didn’t answer, for reasons above.

So now that we established that Big Time is indeed a papermill catering to russian customers, here are the video interviews of Zvansky with the Nobel Prize laureates, as I promised. I show those from Big Time’s English-language YouTube channel, there are also dubbed versions in russian (the main channel) and in Ukrainian.

1. Takaaki Kajita, professor at University of Tokyo in Japan, Nobel Prize in Physics 2015. Interview with Zvansky, posted in May 2020:

2. Randy Scheckman, professor at University of California Berkeley in USA, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2013. Interview with Zvansky, posted in October 2020:

3. Jean-Pierre Sauvage, professor at University of Strasbourg in France, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2016. Interview with Zvansky, posted in December 2020:

4. Sir J Fraser Stoddart, emeritus professor at Northwestern University in USA, now professor at University of Hong Kong in China, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2016. Interview with Zvansky, posted in November 2021:

5. Morten Meldal, professor at the University of Copenhagen, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2022. Interview with Zvansky, posted in August 2023:

I received replies from all five Nobelists.

Fraser Stoddart was the first to reply, with this short message:

“I never agreed to collaborate with this organization. END OF STORY!”

Followed by his second and last email:

“I don’t recall having this interview. NO MORE E-MAILS PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Attached to that strange reply was Stoddart’s template text with “a list of the the things I do” , while “tasks that are not on the list […] are off the table.” The on the table list included “Confront bullies in Hong Kong universities: bullying is rife here in academia“. Uhm, who will tell it to him?

For some reason, the on the table list didn’t include Stoddart’s past and present activities like:

• Running the Noble Panacea company which sells anti-aging skin care moisturisers based on his proprietary Organic Super Molecular Vessels^TM technology (read February 2023 Shorts);
• Joining trashy predatory FLOGEN scamferences run by a clown named Florian Kongoli, after which the latter started bestowing a trashy Stoddart International Scientific Award (read reporting by Pepijn van Erp);
• Acting as Editor-in-Chief of the papermill-infested journal Applied Nanoscience, and then quietly stepping down when the papermill scandal was exposed, read here.
• Saving his own papers with manipulated data even from corrections, read below:

Morten Meldal replied last, after some reminders. His interview with Zvansky was posted in August 2023, while russia is committing genocide in Ukraine. Also, despite the boycott by his own university from 1 March 2022: “The rectors from all eight Danish universities, including the rector of the University of Copenhagen (UCPH) Henrik C. Wegener, signed a declaration Tuesday to stop all bilateral, institutional collaboration with government-linked institutions in Russia and Belarus.”

The Danish Nobel Prize laureate found my pointing out of the above “highly offensive”:

“Leonid
I do not know what your business is, and I find the email below highly offensive.
Yes I distance myself from any paper mill including the Russian and I think this whole thing is a scam, including the email content below.
The video you link to is a fake where they (Big Time) have taken a video from somewhere else and added Russian crap to it.
I never gave that interview.“

In his next email, Meldal reiterated:

“I have never seen the person in that video and I am absolutely completely disgusted with what Putin does and have done in Ukraine and in Syria and in Georgia and……
I have always been loud about that at any occasion asked for my opinion.
I kindly ask you to take a closer look at that video and you will realize that it is a fake, it is so easy to see if you take a closer look.
So I repeat I never did that interview and I would like you to acknowledge that.“

Does it mean Meldal and Stoddart indeed never gave those interviews? Is it all some kind of russian deep fake?

Not really. Three other Nobelists admitted to have been interviewed by Zvansky, which makes Meldal”s version somewhat difficult to believe.

Jean-Pierre Sauvage replied:

“I also would like to distance myself from the Russian papermills.“

The French Nobelist then shared with me Zvansky’s email from 28 May 2018. Zvansky pretended to be acting from Poland, and opened his email with:

“My name is Alex Zvansky, I am a founder of the scientific platform Big Time for assisting in scientific publications and sponsoring the scientists’ research around the world. I would like to invite you to be our advisor in the company […] I will also be glad to explain you, what it means to be advisor, in more detail.”.

The email contained links to Big Time’s now defunct Polish website (wos-scopus.eu). That’s what it looked like in 2018, it openly ran an authorship market:

In his invitation to Sauvage to join as his advisor, Zvansky spoke of “the upcoming campaign of enlargement of the platform” which would include:

“MarketPlace is a platform that will allow each user to sell their best practices or research or to buy what is offered for sale, as well as find necessary services for its own use at any location of the world”

Yes, Zvansky openly admitted to Sauvage to be running a papermill…

Takaaki Kajita wrote in his email to me:

“I think that I agreed to an interview several years ago.
But I never thought that the interview was used to a papermill. Yes, I would like to distance myself from advertising for a Russian papermill.”

The Japanese Nobelist also shared the email which the “scientific consultant and specialist in the study of science, founder of the Big Time scientific platform” Zvansky sent on 14 April 2000, inviting “dear Mr. Takaaki Kajita” to a “5-10 minutes” video interview:

“Interested in your experience, vision of the situation, decisions on the topic of coronavirus and the current pandemic. What are the solutions in your country? Advice from you for colleagues from Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan and other CIS countries.

No mention of papermilling or offers of advisory jobs there.

Now, the last Nobelist. Randy Scheckman replied to me immediately, and also shared an email from Zvansky from 19 August 2020, it was quite similar to that to Kajita. Also there, Krakow-based Zvansky asked for “a little time as an expert, it will  take 5-10 minutes” bit this time he used Kajita’s earlier video interview with Big Time as a bait. The bait worked.

Scheckman also said about his YouTube interview:

“…that interview is one that I agreed to do but I have no knowledge of its use in this capacity.  I have now searched my email record from 4 years ago and find that the interviewer was Alex Zvansky and he appeared to me to be doing this recording from Poland.  However, he clearly was sharing this in the Russian network of countries.  I have also found subsequent correspondence with him where I insisted that he correct misrepresentation of what I said in my interview.”

Indeed. Zvansky turned Scheckman, a known activist for open science and against journal metrics, into an antivaxxer, by attributing this quote to him:

“WE DON’T NEED VACCINE FOR COVID-19”

On 24 March 2021, Scheckman sent this protest message to Zvansky:

““My comment was that we might have avoided the whole pandemic if we had recognized from previous coronavirus epidemics that this was going to emerge again so we should have been prepared with drugs that kill the
virus and have several to use as has been so successful in the treatment
if HIV.”“

Of course Scheckman never said that, and indeed Zvansky swiftly removed the antivax blurb, but only in the English original version, not on the russian and Ukrainian dubbed ones. In his reply to the Nobelist, the papermiller however insisted: “We talked about the necessity of the vaccine, and you said you were dubious on it.” That was of course another lie. Scheckman actually spoke of the necessity of being prepared for a pandemic with antiviral drugs. But I understand Zvansky: his papermill customers would surely be attracted by antivaxxery.

---