A black market for ‘fake patents’ is a new poison in Indian research

Published 25 June 2026 · local

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

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 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.