United2Act: The Coalition Coordinating Publishers’ Response to Paper Mills

Paper mills don’t submit to one journal at a time — the same fabricated manuscript is often shopped in parallel across multiple publishers, so a rejection from one journal costs the mill nothing if the same paper can quietly move to the next. United2Act is the industry’s answer to that structural gap: a multi-stakeholder coalition, coordinated jointly by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM Association), that brings publishers, research institutions, funders, and infrastructure organizations together around a shared, public commitment to act on paper mills collectively rather than each fighting the problem alone.

It is easy to conflate United2Act with the STM Integrity Hub since both trace back to the same 2022 research and both involve overlapping publisher membership, but they are different layers of the same response. This guide covers what United2Act actually is, how it started, what its five-point Consensus Statement commits signatories to, what its two phases have produced, who has signed on, and how it differs in practice from the Integrity Hub.

What United2Act Is

United2Act is best understood as a coordination framework, not a piece of screening software. Its output is shared standards, guidance documents, training resources, and a public consensus statement — not a detection tool that flags a specific manuscript. Individual publishers, editorial offices, and platforms (including the STM Integrity Hub) are the ones who then implement the practices United2Act’s working groups recommend. The initiative describes its membership as comprising research institutions, publishers, investigative researchers (“sleuths”), universities, funders, and scholarly-publishing infrastructure organizations — a deliberately cross-sector mix, on the premise that a paper-mill submission touches every one of those parties at some point in its lifecycle.

How It Started: The 2022 COPE/STM Research and the May 2023 Summit

United2Act’s direct origin is a 2022 joint research report from COPE and STM, conducted with Maverick Publishing Services using data submitted by publishers themselves rather than any single journal’s anecdotal experience. That report was the first industry-wide attempt to size the paper-mill problem with shared data, and it concluded that the scale of the problem required coordinated, cross-publisher action — not each journal building its own defenses in isolation.

That conclusion led to a virtual summit in May 2023, where roughly 40 participants from around 15 countries — publishers (including Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley, among others), research institutions, funders, and infrastructure organizations such as ORCID and Clarivate, alongside independent research-integrity investigators — worked through what a coordinated response should actually cover. That summit produced a Consensus Statement, published in January 2024, organized around five areas of collaborative action. STM and COPE jointly fund the initiative; Dr. Nandita Quaderi (Clarivate) has served as a co-chair.

The Consensus Statement’s Five Areas of Collaborative Action

Organizations and individuals who endorse the Consensus Statement commit to collective action across five areas:

• Education and awareness — helping researchers, institutions, and editorial staff recognize paper-mill red flags and understand why the problem requires a coordinated response.
• Improving post-publication correction processes — making it faster and more consistent to correct or retract compromised literature once a paper-mill submission is identified after publication.
• Researching paper mills — building the shared evidence base on how paper mills operate, since effective detection depends on understanding their actual production and submission patterns.
• Developing shared trust markers — working toward common signals publishers and platforms can use to flag manuscript or author risk in a way that’s legible across the industry, rather than every organization inventing its own.
• Strengthening cross-sector communication — improving the channels through which publishers, institutions, funders, and integrity investigators actually share what they’re finding, since paper mills exploit exactly the gaps where nobody is talking to anybody else.

These five areas are also the organizing structure the initiative’s Phase 1 working groups were built around.

Phase 1 (2023–2025): What the Working Groups Produced

United2Act’s first phase ran for roughly 18 months, from the 2023 summit through its formal conclusion in June 2025, financially supported by STM and COPE. Five working groups, mapped to the five Consensus Statement action areas, developed guidance, publications, and training resources over that period, documented in a Phase 1 report and recommendations published via the STM Association. The through-line across Phase 1’s output is that it is deliberately practice-facing rather than purely diagnostic: guidance documents and training materials that an editorial office, institutional integrity officer, or funder compliance team can actually put to use, rather than another restatement of how large the paper-mill problem is.

Phase 2 (2025–2027): From Recommendations to Implementation

United2Act’s current phase, running 2025 through 2027, is explicitly framed as an implementation and outreach project rather than a research or standard-setting one — putting Phase 1’s resources into practice across the community rather than producing new guidance from scratch. It is organized around three working groups rather than the original five:

• Education — extending awareness materials and training to researchers, institutions, and editorial staff who haven’t yet engaged with Phase 1’s output.
• Stakeholder Responsibilities — clarifying what each type of stakeholder (publisher, institution, funder, individual researcher) is actually expected to do in response to a suspected paper-mill case.
• Funder Outreach — a deliberate widening of scope beyond publishers and institutions, on the premise that funders sit upstream of the problem and have their own compliance and integrity levers to pull.

The Funder Outreach group is a genuine structural change from Phase 1: it reflects a recognition that publishers alone can screen submissions, but they can’t reach a paper mill’s supply side — researchers under pressure to publish, sometimes with funder-mandated output requirements attached — without funders themselves being part of the response.

Who’s Involved: Signatories and Governance

Organizations and individuals demonstrate their commitment to United2Act by formally endorsing the Consensus Statement. As of the current list published at united2act.org/signatories, 54 organizations are named as signatories, spanning several distinct categories:

• Commercial and society publishers — including Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, PLOS, eLife, Frontiers, and De Gruyter, alongside university presses such as Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and MIT Press.
• Research institutions and universities — signatory institutions from multiple countries.
• Publishing and research infrastructure — organizations including ORCID and Clarivate, plus research-integrity-focused bodies such as the Center for Open Science.
• Funders and governance bodies — including the European Research Council and national research agencies.
• Scientific and scholarly societies — including bodies such as the American Physical Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Note for anyone tracking this figure over time: the signatory count is not static — it grew from the roughly 40 organizations represented at the original May 2023 summit as more publishers, institutions, and societies formally endorsed the Consensus Statement in the following years, and the site itself notes it is no longer accepting new individual (as opposed to organizational) signatories. Treat any specific count, including the one above, as a snapshot as of when it was checked, and consult the live signatories page directly for the current figure rather than citing an older number as fixed.

United2Act vs. the STM Integrity Hub: Two Different Layers of the Same Response

United2Act and the STM Integrity Hub are frequently mentioned together because they share an origin (the same 2022 COPE/STM research) and overlapping publisher participants, but they solve different parts of the problem:

• United2Act is a coordination and standards-setting framework. It produces consensus commitments, guidance, and training — the shared understanding of what “good” looks like across the industry — and increasingly, as of Phase 2, direct outreach to funders and stakeholder-responsibility clarification.
• The STM Integrity Hub is operational, technical infrastructure: a shared manuscript-screening layer that flags duplicate/simultaneous submissions and integrates risk-scoring tools like the Papermill Alarm at the point of submission, so a red flag raised at one participating publisher is visible to others.

In practice, the Integrity Hub is one of the concrete things a publisher can point to as evidence it is acting on United2Act’s commitments — the Hub is an implementation of the “shared trust markers” and “cross-sector communication” action areas, not a competing initiative. An institution or editorial office asking “is my publisher serious about paper mills” should reasonably look for both: whether the publisher has endorsed the United2Act Consensus Statement, and whether it participates in operational screening infrastructure like the Integrity Hub.

What This Means for Research Administrators and Institutions

United2Act’s Consensus Statement is open to institutional endorsement, not just publishers — a university, research institute, or funder can sign on in the same way a publisher does. For a research-integrity office, that has a few practical implications:

• Endorsing the Consensus Statement is a low-cost, public commitment that can anchor an institution’s own paper-mill-response policy to an externally recognized standard, rather than writing one from scratch.
• The Education and Stakeholder Responsibilities working groups’ output (Phase 2) is the most directly usable material for an institution building or updating internal guidance on what to do when a suspected paper-mill case surfaces — whether it originates from a journal notification, an external sleuth, or an internal audit.
• Funder Outreach is worth monitoring specifically by grants and compliance offices, since it signals that funder-level expectations around paper-mill exposure in funded outputs are an active area of development, not a settled one.
• When evaluating a publisher relationship or journal (for authorship guidance, special-issue participation decisions, or vendor selection), whether the publisher is a United2Act signatory and whether it uses infrastructure like the Integrity Hub are both reasonable, verifiable due-diligence questions.

For the broader mechanics of how a paper-mill submission is actually recognized and how a resulting retraction proceeds once a journal acts, see CASRAI’s guides on paper mills and tortured phrases and how long a retraction takes, and COPE’s own retraction and misconduct guidelines.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is United2Act a publisher, a regulator, or a certification body?

None of the three. It has no enforcement or certification authority — it cannot decertify a journal or compel a publisher to act. It is a voluntary, consensus-based coordination initiative; its leverage comes from public endorsement and shared guidance, not regulatory power.

Can a university or research institution join United2Act, or is it publishers-only?

Institutions can and do endorse the Consensus Statement alongside publishers, funders, and infrastructure organizations — the current signatory list includes universities and research institutions, not only publishers.

Does signing the Consensus Statement mean a publisher uses the STM Integrity Hub?

Not automatically. They are separate commitments: endorsing United2Act’s Consensus Statement is a policy-level commitment, while joining the Integrity Hub is a separate operational/technical integration decision. A publisher can do either without the other, though many large publishers do both.

How is United2Act funded and who runs it day to day?

It is financially supported jointly by STM (the STM Association) and COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics), with COPE hosting the initiative’s website and administrative footprint. Governance has included co-chairs drawn from participating organizations, such as Dr. Nandita Quaderi of Clarivate.