Anna Abalkina, a research-integrity sleuth and social scientist at the Free University of Berlin, discovered the paper mill in 2022 after spotting papers with author e-mail addresses that had domains that did not match the geographical locations of academic affiliations. She dubbed the paper mill Tanu.pro after the most frequently used of these unusual domains.

Abalkina later teamed up with Svetlana Kleiner, a research-integrity officer at the publisher Springer Nature, who is based in Leiden, the Netherlands. Together, they traced more than 60 suspicious e-mail domains that were linked to Tanu.pro and appeared among the author e-mails of 1,517 papers published between 2017 and 2025, listing more than 4,500 researchers affiliated with around 460 universities across 46 countries. The majority of the authors were in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and russia.

During her investigation into a number of peculiar e-mail domains that cropped up on hundreds of papers, Abalkina established that one of the domains was registered to a founder of a Kyiv-based company called Scientific Publications, which was established in 2016. Scientific Publications told Nature that it does not own or use the domain tanu.pro or others identified by the investigation. When asked whether or not the company produces papers to order, sells authorships or creates e-mail addresses for its clients, a spokesperson for Scientific Publications said: "Technologies and working methods of our company are considered commercial secrets, as they provide us with a competitive advantage." But some of the wording on the website – such as "Order the publication of scientific article in high-rated journal right now" – implies that papers are produced to order or that authors can buy their way onto papers.

Source https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02809-y?fbclid=IwY2xjawMoTLFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHoC59Vrdf-TjoqeTjtPxDHkHxQhTJkClqCMxFKAPikloGVa6nHtafZR70t1I_aem_2RlqIOCC2wrAEGT9C3R1kw#ref-CR1

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