Wiley closes 19 Hindawi journals after a paper-mill flood

Academic publisher Wiley announced it was closing 19 journals previously run under its Hindawi imprint, after two years of what it called a “massive influx” of fraudulent submissions. Inside Higher Ed reported the closures came from paper mills — businesses that sell authorship slots on fabricated studies — several of which had exploited generative AI to produce plausible-sounding text and figures faster than reviewers could check them.

Wiley had bought Hindawi, an open-access publisher with roughly 250 titles, in 2021. It shut four Hindawi journals in May 2023 after paper mills overran them, then discontinued the Hindawi brand entirely in December 2023 before folding the remaining journals into its main imprint or closing them. The Register reported Wiley had retracted more than 11,300 papers from the Hindawi portfolio over the two-year period, and that the disruption had cost the company $18 million in publishing revenue. A Wiley spokesperson told the outlet that “the industry recognizes that AI is utilized by paper mills to generate fraudulent content,” and said Wiley had introduced new screening technology to catch it before publication.

Some individual titles had accumulated extreme retraction counts: Chemistry World reported a telecommunications journal and a complementary-medicine journal each had more than 500 retractions on the Retraction Watch database. Wiley was not alone — the article cited research estimating over 400,000 published articles bore “strong similarities” to known paper-mill products, with roughly 70,000 appearing in the preceding year alone.

The episode became a reference point for arguments that peer review, built for a much smaller submission volume, was not equipped to catch machine-assisted fabrication at scale, and that publishers would need automated detection tools of their own to keep pace.