I wanna know about the crime syndicate!

I wanna know about the crime syndicate. Crime syndicate, that is. Crime syndicate that is the crime of faking academic research, making it so good it can pass peer review, selling it to academics, and then it gets published in academic journals. Hi, my name is Jess, I'm a social media professor, researcher, and teacher at the University of Georgia, and I am the founding editor-in-chief of a new Springer Nature academic journal, Creator and Influencer Studies. When I did all of my onboarding training for this role, part of the onboarding modules consisted of learning about paper mills and learning how to identify research that comes from paper mills. And these paper mills are exactly what I said in the intro. They are groups that fake research. They do it with the goal of that academics can buy these papers from them, pass them off as their own, and get them published in peer review. And when I went to my point person at Springer Nature about this and was like, what the hell, I didn't even realize this was a thing, she just said, oh, don't worry, this is less of a problem in the social science and humanities journals like yours, and way more of a problem in the hard sciences. To which I said, but I want to briefly talk about this from two perspectives. One from the point of precarious academic labor, and the other from the myth of objectivity in academic research. And when I take a step back and look at this, I don't necessarily see this as an indictment on an individual, though nobody should ever buy a paper and try to pass it off as their own. I see this as an indictment of a system that leads people to be so stressed about the prospects of getting tenure and promotion that they are willing to do whatever it takes to try to get it. I have seen good people not get tenure, and the risk of losing your job and being fired on a whim is enough to make people, yeah, do some crazy shit. Again, I'm not advocating. I'm just saying when you take a step back, you can kind of see why someone would do it. Two, we have this idea in academia that the holy grail of academic knowledge is the peer-reviewed academic article. And I'm not saying I don't believe in this, because if I didn't, why would I be the editor-in-chief of a journal? But what I am saying is we do need to dispel ourselves of the notion just a little bit that this is a purely objective system free from bias. We do try to mitigate for this bias and weaken it whenever possible. For instance, when I am searching for reviewers in the editorial system, a notification will pop up if I select someone who has worked at the same institution as an author in the last three years. I also make my own declarations as an editor-in-chief to avoid that type of bias. But as a qualitative researcher myself, I know that we are not exempt from any type of bias. We just try to mitigate it. But if people can buy fake research articles and pass them off as their own and get through peer review, I think it's time to call a spade a spade and realize this process is not without its numerous flaws. And that this myth of objectivity harms researchers, it harms the labor process of doing this type of work, and I think it further perpetuates the anxieties that would lead somebody to try to get one of these articles in the first place. Let me know what questions you have down below.