A false friend: hijacked journals

In an earlier blog post we looked at the issue of predatory publishing, the phenomenon of publishers who cut corners and ditch ethics in order to make money from the work of researchers, with a significant impact on the integrity of research and potentially to the reputations of researchers. In this post, we are going to look at one of the tactics of predatory publishing: hijacking journals.

While the usual form of predatory publishing involves creating new journals, some predatory publishers take an approach that can make it harder to detect when a journal is predatory. Hijacked journals are exactly what they sound like. A website is created that copies or otherwise pretends to be the website for an existing journal and then emails are sent to authors calling for papers. Details of the real journal will be used, such as the ISSN and potentially information like the editorial board, purely for the purpose of extracting article processing charges from authors.

In some cases the existing expired domain used by a journal can be bought up and used by unscrupulous publishers looking to trade off the good reputation of a now defunct journal (Abalkina, 2024). Once the article processing charge has been paid, the chances are that the paper will never appear or if it does it will not have been through proper peer review or editing.

The first journal known to be hijacked was Archives des Sciences in 2012. At this point, hijacking was usually perpetrated against print only journals, with hijackers creating a website where none existed.

Hijacked journals can temporarily end up in indexing services like Scopus and Web of Science (Abalkina, 2023), which can give them an air of authenticity that they shouldn’t have.

It also seems to be common practice for hijacked journals to use and plagiarise papers already presented in other predatory journals (Abalkina, 2024).

Obviously presenting work in a hijacked journal is not going to be very helpful to your career, so it is important to be aware of this. As with other predatory journals, one of the major issues with publishing in these journals is that you may not be able to repurpose the research to publish in a genuine venue once you've shared it this way, and so you can lose a lot of time and effort for little reward.

So what do you need to look out for?

If you’re approached by email with a call for papers, always be wary. Much like phishing emails, emails from predatory publishers often feature spelling and grammatical errors and will show a lack of understanding of your work. You may find yourself being addressed by a title you haven’t got, or being told you are an expert in an area you have not published in.

If you are tempted, assess the journal website, thinking about the issues below.

• If you use a search engine (or engines) to look for the journal title, are there multiple websites in the listings?
• Look for articles from the journal in a database like Scopus or Web of Science. Many real journals use DOIs these days and the records will often feature links to the real website.
• Have the articles in the journal appeared anywhere else?
• Does the journal have DOIs and do they work if you put them into Crossref?
• How extensive is the website? Are there multiple issues of the journal available?
• If papers are available on the website, have a look at some of them. Menon (2019) notes that available papers are likely to be copies of papers from other journals, or of a low quality in terms of copyediting.
• What is the peer review process for the journal? If listed, how quick is the peer review time? (If it is short it suggests a poor peer review process)
• Try reaching out to authors of some of the articles to ask about their experience.
• Are charges explained in a transparent way?

If you are uncertain about a journal and would like a second opinion, please feel free to contact the Scholarly Communications Team

Further reading

A. Abalkina (2023) Challenges posed by hijacked journals in Scopus, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 75 (4), pp. 395-422. DOI: 10.1002/asi.24855

A. Abalkina (2024) Prevalence of plagiarism in hijacked journals: A text similarity analysis, Accountability in Research. DOI: 10.1080/08989621.2024.2387210

V. G. Menon (2019) Hijacked journals: what they are and how to avoid them. Retrieved from https://clarivate.com/academia-government/blog/hijacked-journals-what-they-are-and-how-to-avoid-them/

Image: Jens Reisenberg (2024) A shot of the German fasnet. Shared under the unsplash licence.