Patents are sought by academics and their institutions to protect their inventions. Academics also seek patents to enhance their individual profile and status for the purpose of job and promotion opportunities. Some institutions recognize the awarding of a patent to an individual academic as equivalent to or sometimes greater than publication in an international peer-reviewed journal. This article addresses the concerning development of patent inventorship credit (or credit that might be viewed as inventorship credit) being offered for sale by established education fraud companies alongside offers for authorship on academic papers and thesis writing. This article focuses on design registration in the United Kingdom (UK) but the issues identified are globally applicable. We characterize in detail the footprint of eight firms that are likely involved in the sale of thousands of UK registered designs to Indian academics for the purpose of academic reputation manipulation. Unlike patents, design registration applications are not examined for novelty or individual character (i.e. for whether the designs are actually new or innovative). Due to this limited examination process, these registrations generally issue quite quickly. We argue that exploitation of intellectual property systems should be considered one facet of the global enterprise of education fraud, alongside essay mills, diploma mills and research paper mills.

IISc is one of India's best universities for research but was ranked 50th. Makes one wonder who is making these rankings and how someone can get it this wrong.

PLOS, Frontiers, and others announce policies trying to stem the tide of suspect research

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There are comments on PubPeer for publication: Evaluation of the evidence on acetaminophen use and neurodevelopmental disorders using the Navigation Guide methodology (2025)

Paper mills, scientific fraud, and the decline of public trust in scientific institutions

There are comments on PubPeer for publication: Efficacy of oral folinic acid supplementation in children with autism spectrum disorder: a randomized double-blind, placebo-controlled trial (2024)

To guard against identity theft, academic publishers have been using institutional email addresses to verify authors and reviewers are who they say they are. Now, however, findings appearing in a p…

“Authors thank the members of NeuroDigitech for their contribution to data generation, and all the animals that contributed to these studies.”

A new preprint is making the rounds falsely claiming to correlate "contamination" of COVID-19 vaccines with plasmid DNA to VAERS reports.

Social scientists are now using large language models to create "silicon samples" - synthetic datasets intended to stand in for human respondents, aimed at revolutionising human subjects research. How...

Republican lawmakers consistently provided robust federal funding, often exceeding Democrats