It keeps happening.
There was the case of Talent Development and Excellence, which cloned an existing journal and managed to index hundreds of articles in Scopus, one of the world’s leading databases for scholarly literature. The Transylvanian Review did the same thing, and so did Test Engineering and Management.
These journals — which can make millions of dollars for their illegitimate publishers — exploit vulnerabilities in Scopus, owned by Elsevier, by making themselves look close enough to real journals, often exploiting the real ISSN and other metadata of those titles. That, in turn, entices potentially unknowing authors whose careers may depend on publishing in journals in major indexes.
Now into the mix comes Annals of the Romanian Society for Cell Biology. This time, the tip-off, discovered by Russian scholar Dmitry Dubrovsky, was almost unbelievable: an article about the Great Patriotic War — the Soviet resistance to Germany’s 1941 invasion — in a journal specializing in biochemistry, genetics, and molecular biology.
That motivated us to analyze the journal’s website and led to other tell-tale discoveries. First, the domain was registered anonymously in October 2020, even though the original journal was active for many years and had been covered by Scopus since 2009. Second, the legitimate journal (ISSN 1583-6258) according to the ISSN portal is published only in the print form. This is very typical to hijack journals without official homepages.
Third, this journal promises to publish a paper within 30 days after completion of the payment. Hijacked journals usually don’t provide any peer-review, and guarantee fast publication. Finally, hijacked journals don’t normally reproduce the archives of authentic journals and recycle already published texts or leave a fictitious paywall to access the archive. In this hijacked journal, instead of older volumes, you can read this message: “Kindly Mail to the Journal to Access These Contents”.
The authentic journal’s data was also compromised in Scopus, with a link to the clone. The content of the hijacked journal has also penetrated Scopus: As of the middle of this month, Scopus has already indexed nearly 3,200 articles from the hijacked journal in 2021, although in the previous five years fewer than 100 per year were indexed. Such a great number of publications in just several months suggests very aggressive marketing and presumably involvement of national broker companies which offer fast publication in international journals.
Authors in this clone journal originate mainly from developing countries: India, Uzbekistan, and Iraq.
Hijacked journals contaminate scientific communication. Some of the articles in the hijacked issues of the journal have been cited by legitimate journals, including PLoS One and Journal of Supercomputing, published by Springer Nature.
The volume is a reminder that journal hijacking became a million-dollar business. Annals of the Romanian Society for Cell Biology charges 14700rs ($200USD) per publication, and has already “published” more than 5,000 papers in 2021.
I was not able to find a legitimate publisher of the journal, but when I contacted the previous publisher, Vasile Goldis Western University of Arad, officials confirmed that it doesn’t publish this journal anymore.
This hijacked journal has another remarkable detail. Its editor-in-chief is Ryon Oelen from Wageningen University & Research. Best I can tell, Oelen does not exist. But when I searched for his name on the Internet I found that he is editor-in-chief of another hijacked journal, Converter, which specializes in engineering. This hijacked journal also ended up in Scopus, and the entry links to the fake journal. So far in 2021, 15 papers from the journal have been indexed in Scopus, all submitted by scholars in China. I contacted Faversham House Group Ltd., the publisher of the journal, but have had no reply.
One may think of hijacked journal indexing in Scopus as an aberration. But the share of illegitimate content from some countries is astonishing. Non-authentic content by authors from Uzbekistan makes up 41.5% of all papers indexed in Scopus from the country in 2021. In Iraq, that share is 8.4%; in India, 1.5%.
Journal hijacking is already a decade-old phenomenon. In that time, at least several hundred journals have been hijacked, according to these four existing lists. Creating a regularly updated list of hijacked journals represents a challenge for the academic community and scholarly communication to prevent expanding deception of authors.
All of that means it is even more alarming that so many of these journals are being indexed in Scopus. They should be removed — but scholars should also be cautious and beware of hijacked journals in international citation databases.
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a one-time tax-deductible contribution or a monthly tax-deductible donation to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.
I don’t believe that these hijacked journals have a real readership. However, it is worrying to see Scopus (an “Expertly curated abstract & citation database”… their words!) being duped in such a way.
Anyone interested in Anna Abalkina’s work on journal identity theft should also read “Detecting a network of hijacked journals by its archive”.
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2101/2101.01224.pdf
Probably other papers as well, but that’s the one that’s currently an open tab on my browser.
I think the authenticated journals shares the largest responsibility.
Each journal should follow their indexed research in international databases such as Web of Science and SCOPUS. The journal should have recognized the fake content early on and should have alerted SCOPUS. This monitoring by the journal is essential to ensure the accuracy of SciScore calculations for the journal by SCOPUS.
Furthermore, by not monitoring its content, the journal contributed to the damage its reputations. Researchers who viewed the fake content over an extended of time, for sure accumulated negative thought about the journal.
The above is part of my earlier comment on a similar item
http://retractionwatch.com/2020/09/01/how-did-content-from-a-hijacked-journal-end-up-in-one-of-the-worlds-most-used-databases/
Taisir, although legitimate journals should perhaps develop the means to be more alert to this type of fraudulence, the largest responsibility lies first with those who perpetrate the fraud, followed by those corporate entities who should know better but perpetuate it (see Sylvain’s comment above) and, lastly, by those governments whose legal structures allow these operations to exist and thrive.
How is it that Scopus keeps getting duped by hijacked content? A significant factor is that Scopus content selection involves less human interaction than similar Web of Science processes. (Full disclosure: I worked with the WoS editorial team for 4 years as manager of publisher relations.) WoS employs a team of editors to research potential hijackings; my team would often reach out to the legitimate publishers to ensure they knew of the hijackings.