Introduction
Try getting on an international flight without proving who you are.
You will probably have bought the ticket using your name, but that is not enough. Before you are allowed onto the aircraft, somebody will want to see a passport or another official form of identification. There are obvious security reasons for doing this, but there is a more fundamental principle at work: the airline wants reasonable assurance that the person travelling is the person named on the booking.
We encounter identity checks throughout our lives. Banks need to know who their customers are. Employers verify the identity of people they employ. Governments require identification before issuing many official documents. Increasingly, online services also want to establish that an account belongs to a real person, and who they are.
Universities certainly understand the principle. When a student sits an examination, we want to know that the person taking the examination is actually the registered student. This has become particularly important as online and distance learning have grown, because the traditional reassurance of having students sitting in a physical examination hall is no longer always available.
Yet there is one activity in universities where proving who you are can be surprisingly unimportant.
Publishing a research paper.
Just tell us who you are
Think about what happens when you submit a manuscript.
You create an account with an editorial system. You provide your name, email address and institutional affiliation. You might connect using your ORCID ID. You enter the names of your co-authors and, depending on the journal and submission system, they might receive an email telling them that a paper has been submitted in their name.
But has anybody actually established that you are who you say you are? In many, perhaps most, cases, the answer is no.
I could create an email account using a different name. I could claim an affiliation with an institution. I could create profiles on various academic platforms. None of these things, individually, proves my identity.
It is worth being particularly careful about ORCID here because it is often regarded as a solution to researcher identity. ORCID is enormously valuable and provides persistent identifiers that help distinguish researchers with similar names and connect researchers with their publications, affiliations and other scholarly activities.
But ORCID itself is very clear about what an ORCID ID does not do. On its website it states that “ORCID is not an identity verification system.”[1]
ORCID does not collect the type of private information that would be required to establish somebody’s legal identity. Instead, confidence in an ORCID record develops through trusted connections to employers, funders, publishers and other organisations.
That distinction matters.
Identifying somebody is not the same as verifying their identity.
Why does authorship matter so much?
Perhaps this would not matter if authorship were little more than a name printed at the top of an article. But authorship is one of the currencies of academic life.
Publications can help somebody obtain a PhD, secure a job, gain promotion, win research funding and build an international reputation. Publication and citation metrics feed into institutional evaluations and university rankings. Authorship can establish priority for an important discovery and can influence somebody’s career for decades, and even serve as a legacy after their death.
We therefore attach enormous value to the names that appear on scholarly papers.
If serious problems are subsequently discovered in a paper, we expect the authors to answer questions. If data have been fabricated, images manipulated or results invented, somebody must ultimately be held responsible.
There is an obvious tension here.
How meaningful is author accountability if the journal has never properly established who the author is?
Paper mills have changed the risk
For much of scholarly publishing’s history, the system has operated largely on trust.
That trust was never perfect. Gift authorship, ghost authorship, fabricated affiliations and other forms of authorship misconduct have existed for many years. But the scale and organisation of contemporary research fraud have changed the nature of the problem.
Paper mills provide perhaps the clearest example.
These are commercial operations that manufacture manuscripts, manipulate the publication process and sell authorship positions to customers who need publications. A 2024 study in Scientific Reports cited an estimate that around 2% of journal submissions across disciplines could originate from paper mills.[2]
This is not somebody acting in isolation. It is an industry, with a significant revenue stream.
A 2025 Nature investigation described businesses selling authorship positions on papers to researchers seeking publications.[3] In April 2026, Science reported a large-scale investigation of thousands of online advertisements offering authorship positions for sale, with prices varying according to factors such as author position and journal.[4]
Once authorship can be bought and sold commercially, weaknesses in researcher identification start to look rather more important, even if this was not the case already.
The problem is bigger than fictitious authors
When we talk about author identity, it is tempting to imagine a completely invented person: Professor Jane Smith of the University of Somewhere, who exists only inside an editorial submission system.
That is certainly one possible form of fraud, but it is not the only one.
A real academic could be impersonated. Somebody could use a genuine researcher’s name without their knowledge. A real person could claim a false institutional affiliation. A genuine researcher could knowingly purchase an authorship position on a paper to which they contributed nothing. A third-party company could manage the manuscript and submission process while presenting the correspondence as though it were coming directly from the researchers.
These are different problems and identity verification would not magically solve all of them.
Indeed, a perfectly genuine, properly identified researcher can still fabricate data, buy authorship or commit other forms of misconduct. But that is not really the point.
The question is whether a publishing system that depends so heavily on knowing who produced a piece of research should have greater confidence that the people claiming authorship are actually the people they claim to be.
We verify the manuscript, but not necessarily the author
What makes this particularly striking is how much effort publishers now devote to checking manuscripts.
Submissions may be screened for plagiarism. Images can be examined for manipulation. References can be analysed. Statistical anomalies can be investigated. Journals and publishers are developing increasingly sophisticated techniques to identify paper-mill activity, problematic manuscripts and other threats to research integrity.
And yet one of the most basic pieces of information associated with the manuscript, the identity of its authors, can still depend heavily on self-declaration.
The publishing industry is aware of the issue. STM now has an active Researcher Identity Task & Finish Group examining how publishers verify authors, reviewers and editors, with the aim of developing a more unified approach to trusted identity in scholarly publishing.[5]
That work seems increasingly necessary.
We have created a scholarly ecosystem in which authorship can generate considerable professional and sometimes financial rewards. At the same time, paper mills and authorship markets have demonstrated that those rewards can be commercially exploited.
Perhaps continuing to assume that everybody is who they say they are is becoming difficult to defend.
A question we can no longer ignore
None of this means that publishers should start demanding passports from every researcher tomorrow.
Identity verification raises difficult questions about privacy, access, cost, international differences and the risk of creating new barriers for legitimate researchers. Those questions deserve serious consideration, and I will return to them in a future edition of this newsletter.
For now, there is a more fundamental question. When somebody submits a manuscript, the journal asks who wrote it. The authors provide some names, affiliations, email addresses and, perhaps, ORCID IDs. The system largely proceeds on the assumption that those claims are genuine.
Given what authorship is worth, and given what we now know about paper mills, authorship-for-sale and organised research fraud, perhaps that assumption is no longer enough.
If authorship can determine careers, grants, reputations and academic standing, shouldn’t a journal at least know who its authors actually are?
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About the Author
Graham Kendall is Vice-Chancellor of GlobalNxt University, Malaysia, and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Nottingham. He has published more than 300 peer-reviewed papers and has held senior editorial roles, including Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games and Associate Editor of the Journal of the Operational Research Society.
Publishing with Integrity explores the challenges facing academic publishing, research integrity and scholarly communication.
[1] https://support.orcid.org/hc/en-us/articles/360006972413-Does-an-ORCID-iD-assure-my-identity, accessed 31 August 2026
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-71230-8, accessed 31 August 2026
[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01824-3, accessed 31 August 2026
[4] https://www.science.org/content/article/thousands-shady-ads-sell-paper-authorship-cash-large-scale-investigation-finds, accessed 31 August 2026
[5] https://stm-assoc.org/what-we-do/strategic-areas/standards-technology/researcher-id-tfg/, accessed 31 August 2026