Journal hijacking refers to the brandjacking of a legitimate academic journal by a malicious third party. Typically, the imposter journal sets up a fraudulent website for the purpose of offering scholars the opportunity to rapidly publish their research online for a fee. [1] [2] [3] The term hijacked journal may refer to either the fraud [4] or the legitimate journal. [5] The fraudulent journals are also known as "clone journals". [6] Similar hijacking can occur with academic conferences. [2] [7]
In 2012, cyber criminals began hijacking print-only journals by registering a domain name and creating a fake website under the title of the legitimate journals. [2]
The first journal to be hijacked was the Swiss journal Archives des Sciences . In 2012 and 2013, more than 20 academic journals were hijacked. [1] In some cases, scammers find their victims in conference proceedings, extracting authors' emails from papers and sending them fake calls for papers. [8]
There have also been instances of journal hijacking wherein hijackers take over the journal's existing domain name after the journal publisher neglects to pay the domain name registration fees on time. [3] [9]
There are several hundred documented cases of journal hijackings; hijacked journals with existing Wikipedia articles include: [10] [11]
Medknow Publications also known as Wolters Kluwer Medknow or simply Medknow, is a publisher of academic journals on behalf of learned societies and associations. Previously an independent Indian publisher, Medknow is now part of within Wolters Kluwer's Health Division, and is part of Wolters Kluwer India.
Hindawi was a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journals active in scientific, technical, and medical (STM) literature. It was founded in 1997 in Cairo, Egypt, and purchased in 2021 for $298 million by John Wiley & Sons, a large US-based publishing company.
MDPI is a publisher of open-access scientific journals. It publishes over 390 peer-reviewed, open access journals. MDPI is among the largest publishers in the world in terms of journal article output, and is the largest publisher of open access articles.
Pulsus Group is a health informatics and digital marketing company and publisher of scientific, technical, and medical literature. It was formed in 1984, primarily to publish peer-reviewed medical journals. As of 2016, Pulsus published 98 hybrid and full open-access journals, 15 of which had been adopted as the official publications of related medical societies. Pulsus Group also conducts conferences in association with scientific societies.
Index Copernicus (IC) is an online database of user-contributed all information, including profiles of scientists, as well as of scientific institutions, publications and projects established in 1999 in Poland, and operated by Index Copernicus International. The database, named after Nicolaus Copernicus, has several assessment tools to track the impact of scientific works and publications, individual scientists, or research institutions. In addition to the productivity aspects, IC also offers the traditional abstracting and indexing of scientific publications.
Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP) is a predatory academic publisher of open-access electronic journals, conference proceedings, and scientific anthologies that are considered to be of questionable quality. As of December 2014, it offered 244 English-language open-access journals in the areas of science, technology, business, economy, and medicine.
Frontiers in Psychology is a peer-reviewed open-access academic journal covering all aspects of psychology. It was established in 2010 and is published by Frontiers Media, a controversial company that is included in Jeffrey Beall's list of "potential, possible, or probable predatory publishers". The editor-in-chief is Axel Cleeremans.
Retraction Watch is a blog that reports on retractions of scientific papers and on related topics. The blog was launched in August 2010 and is produced by science writers Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus. Its parent organization is the Center for Scientific Integrity, a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
OMICS Publishing Group is a predatory publisher of open access academic journals. It started publishing its first journal in 2008. By 2015, it claimed over 700 journals, although about half of them were defunct. Its subsidiaries and brands include Allied Academies, Conference Series LLC LTD, EuroSciCon LTD, Hilaris Publishing, iMedPub LTD, International Online Medical Council (IOMC), Longdom Publishing SL, Meetings International, Prime Scholars, Pulsus Group, Research & Reviews, SciTechnol, Trade Science Inc, Life Science Events, Walsh Medical Media, and IT Medical Team.
Frontiers Media SA is a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journals currently active in science, technology, and medicine. It was founded in 2007 by Kamila and Henry Markram. Frontiers is based in Lausanne, Switzerland, with offices in the United Kingdom, Spain, and China. In 2022, Frontiers employed more than 1,400 people, across 14 countries. All Frontiers journals are published under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
Wulfenia: Mitteilungen des Kärntner Botanikzentrums is a print-only peer-reviewed scientific journal of botany published by the Regional Museum of Carinthia. It was established in 1998 and the editor-in-chief is Roland K. Eberwein.
Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model, where the journal or publisher prioritizes self-interest at the expense of scholarship. It is characterized by misleading information, deviates from the standard peer review process, is highly non-transparent, and often utilizes aggressive solicitation practices.
Beall's List was a prominent list of predatory open-access publishers that was maintained by University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall on his blog Scholarly Open Access. The list aimed to document open-access publishers who did not perform real peer review, effectively publishing any article as long as the authors pay the article processing charge. Originally started as a personal endeavor in 2008, Beall's List became a widely followed piece of work by the mid-2010s. The list was used by scientists to identify exploitative publishers and detect publisher spam.
"Who's Afraid of Peer Review?" is an article written by Science correspondent John Bohannon that describes his investigation of peer review among fee-charging open-access journals. Between January and August 2013, Bohannon submitted fake scientific papers to 304 journals owned by fee-charging open access publishers. The papers, writes Bohannon, "were designed with such grave and obvious scientific flaws that they should have been rejected immediately by editors and peer reviewers", but 60% of the journals accepted them. The article and associated data were published in the 4 October 2013 issue of Science as open access.
Jeffrey Beall is an American librarian and library scientist, who drew attention to "predatory open access publishing", a term he coined, and created Beall's list, a list of potentially predatory open-access publishers. He is a critic of the open access publishing movement and particularly how predatory publishers use the open access concept, and is known for his blog Scholarly Open Access. He has also written on this topic in The Charleston Advisor, in Nature, in Learned Publishing, and elsewhere.
Neuropsychiatry is a quarterly peer-reviewed open access medical journal covering research on neuropsychiatry. The journal was established in 2011 and originally published by Future Medicine with Wayne Goodman and F. Markus Leweke serving as its founding editors-in-chief up to 2015. Under the Future Science imprint, the journal's impact factor ranged from 0.486 to 1.456 (2012-2015). Since 2016 it is published by Pulsus Group via its openaccessjournals.com imprint, which is on Jeffrey Beall's list of "potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers". According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal had a 2016 journal impact factor of 4.778. However, that impact factor was based on a total of 9 "citable items" in 2014, as no articles were deemed "citable" in subsequent years, and in 2018 the journal was omitted from the 2017 Journal Citation Reports.
Future Medicine is a privately owned company based in London, England, United Kingdom. It is part of Future Science Publishing Group, primarily to publish peer-reviewed medical journals. Future Medicine publishes hybrid and full open access journals.
Predatory conferences or predatory meetings are meetings set up to appear as legitimate scientific conferences but which are exploitative as they do not provide proper editorial control over presentations, and advertising can include claims of involvement of prominent academics who are, in fact, uninvolved. They are an expansion of the predatory publishing business model, which involves the creation of academic publications built around an exploitative business model that generally involves charging publication fees to authors without providing the editorial and publishing services associated with legitimate journals.
In research, a paper mill is a business that publishes poor or fake journal papers that seem to resemble genuine research, as well as sells authorship.