A worrying new trend of ‘fake patents’, in which education companies sell thousands of patents registered in the U.K. to academics from India and elsewhere, has raised concerns among research integrity experts.

The issue of ‘fake patents’ was flagged in a report published in the International Journal of Educational Integrity. Its authors, from the U.K. and the U.S., wrote “eight firms … are likely involved in the sale of thousands of U.K. registered designs to Indian academics for the purpose of academic reputation manipulation.”

Patent offices don’t examine design applications for novelty, innovation or uniqueness, and award them quickly. This is unlike the more stringent process for patents.

Pay to become an inventor

Patents are typically used to commercialise a new discovery, Subhash Lakhotia, Distinguished Professor at the Cytogenetics Laboratory at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, said.

Not all filed patents are accepted either, and only a small fraction of the accepted ones end up being used by industry.

“Thus, the real value of a patent is when it is used by industry for a process or product,” Prof. Lakhotia, who is also on the advisory board of India Research Watch, a watchdog on Indian research, said.

‘Fake’ patents, filed without any original research by the person (or persons) in whose name the patent is filed, “refer to a non-existing entity,” Prof. Lakhotia said. “This unhealthy and … unethical act is promoted by shady companies acting as patent-filing or facilitating agencies — they sell the authorship of a patent for a non-existing entity to academics, who gain by earning academic points during assessment for academic excellence.”

In the International Journal of Educational Integrity article, the researchers spotlighted firms selling inventorship positions on design patents in the U.K.; but ‘sales’ have also been recorded from India and Australia.

However, these countries do not issue design patents; they issue design registrations, Reese Richardson, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center of Science and Innovation at Northwestern University, U.S. and one of the authors of the paper that highlighted the problem, said.

According to her, design patents issued in the U.S. have to pass a novelty review and have a good chance of being rejected. Design registrations, on the other hand, are usually granted with minimal review.

‘A number of lies’

“Fake patents, like fake research publications, have become a global nuisance in recent decades,” Prof. Lakhotia said.

He added that such “unethical practices” are fuelled by initiatives that rank individual scientists and institutions based on how many papers they have published, how many patents they have filed, etc., “without any concern for the quality”.

In the resulting ‘rank rush’, some unscrupulous agencies exploit individuals’ or institutions’ desire to secure better ranks by selling fake patents and fake research papers.

In the U.K., the design registrations Dr. Richardson’s team studied were usually granted in around 11 days.

“What clients are actually buying are ownership positions on these design registrations,” she said. “Moreover, because these registrations are for ‘designs’, they cover the way an object looks, not how it functions.”

So when an academic buys an “inventorship” on a “U.K. design patent”, “there are a number of lies taking place,” Dr. Richardson added. “The academic has not invented anything; the device does not exist (let alone work); what they have obtained is not a patent; and it does not cover the functionality of the product even if it did work.”

Yet these academics can then tell their employers they have obtained an “international patent”, helping them towards a promotion.

Does India stand out?

“I suspect that this could happen anywhere, but as far as I am aware, selling fake patents has only emerged on the academic black market in India,” Dr. Richardson said.

Three factors contribute to this dubious distinction, Prof. Lakhotia said. They are: (i) the large population seeking education and jobs, (ii) using quantitative metrics without any serious assessment of quality when assessing performance, and (iii) using quantitative parameters by nearly all international and national academic ranking agencies.

Anant Bhan, adjunct professor at Yenepoya (deemed) University, Mangaluru, and an expert on bioethics, said this “likely growing problem … points to the use of mechanisms and loopholes to bolster CVs and metrics which enable career progression and help increase institutional rankings.”

In India, Dr. Bhan added, the fierce competition — among institutions for better ranks and among academics for better jobs — has rendered unethical practices more attractive.

“This is worrisome as [such activity] goes against the core tenets of integrity in science, and the misuse of patent inventorship credits for academic manipulation is a disincentive to genuine scientific work, which focuses on innovation and creation of patents as a part of that pathway,” Dr. Bhan added.

“Other related problems have emerged because of the insistence of Indian rankings upon patents,” Dr. Richardson added. “For instance, many private Indian universities have been filing thousands of utility patents in India in the hopes of pumping up their numbers, often more than the IITs, combined. However, very few (less than 2%) of these patents actually wind up being granted.“

Counteracting the problem

The most important and urgently needed step to curb the growing menace of fake patents and papers is to stop all institutional rankings that are based on quantitative data. In the absence of independent verification, institutions unethically inflate these data, Prof. Lakhotia said.

“The mere filing of a patent, like a manuscript just submitted for publication, must not be used for assessment,” he explained.

Only the patents used by industry should be included in the assessment, he said.

Further, “the agencies that brazenly broker such fake patents and research publications must be taken to task severely,” he added.

“We need to have stronger mechanisms to identify, catalogue, and respond to scientific misconduct,” Dr. Bhan said.

While some research funders in India, such as the state’s Anusandhan National Research Foundation, and some regulators have been looking into using retractions as indicators, “we do need to ramp up efforts” and have a nimble regulatory oversight and governance system, he added.

(A retraction is when a published research paper is withdrawn due to the paper’s contents no longer being valid or credible.)

“We need a comprehensive approach that ensures our academic training programmes incorporate a clear understanding of why such approaches are unethical and not acceptable, mechanisms at institutional level to discourage use of fraudulent academic manipulation tactics, and strong enforcement and action at the level of regulators and funders, including blacklisting, and action on institutions and their rankings,” Dr. Bhan continued.

The best way to counteract this problem would be for the University Grants Commission to substantially reduce, if not completely remove, the role of IP-filing metrics in Indian university rankings and clarify that design registrations, copyright registrations, and filed patents do not count towards such numbers, Dr. Richardson said — echoing Prof. Lakhotia.

“So long as individuals and institutions are evaluated based on quantitative metrics, there will be people selling the opportunity to manipulate those metrics,” she pointed out.

T.V. Padma is a science journalist based in New Delhi.