Have you heard about hijacked journals, which take over legitimate publications’ titles, ISSNs, and other metadata without their permission? We recently launched the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, and will be publishing regular posts like this one to tell the stories of some of those cases.
Certain legitimate journal types are particularly susceptible to hijacking, including niche or trade journals published in English or local languages, print-only journals, and journals indexed in international databases like Web of Science or Scopus. Hijackers typically avoid journals from big, reputable publishers such as Springer, Wiley, and Elsevier.
As a result, multiple networks of hijacked journals created by different cybercriminals target the same legitimate journals, potentially causing the same legitimate journals to have multiple clone websites.
The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker contains a few examples of journals that have been hijacked twice, such as the journal Gorteria (ISSN 0017-2294)
But hijackers have created at least five clone websites for the Seybold Report, a trade publication focused on graphic arts technology. The first clone website was created in 2020 by an Indian network and continued to deceive scholars until 2021. The content of the hijacked journal ended up in Scopus, similar to many other cases of hijacked journals. That clone website has since been deactivated and Scopus has deleted the unauthorized content.
In 2022, at least four other websites cloning the Seybold Report were registered. It appears that at least two of these websites were created by the same fraudulent publishers, as their contact addresses are identical.
| Date of registration | Editorial board | Contact email | Journal warning | |
| seyboldreport.net | 03 March 2022 | Identical to seyboldreport.org, seybold-report.com | [email protected] | Accuse seyboldreport.org to be fake |
| seyboldreports.org | 28 Apr 2022 | Not available | [email protected] | – |
| seyboldreport.org | 5 May 2022 | Identical to seyboldreport.net, seybold-report.com | [email protected] | Accuse seyboldreport.net to be fake |
| seybold-report.com | 23 Dec 2022 | Identical to seyboldreport.org, seyboldreport.net | [email protected] | Accuse seyboldreport.org and seyboldreport.net to be fake |
Three clone websites share identical editorial boards that include the names of prominent scholars without their permission. Jonathan Dingel, an associate professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, is listed as editor-in-chief of a hijacked Seybold Report, but confirmed that he has nothing to do with the journal.
Notably, three of the newly created clones are accusing each other of being fake and claiming to be the original journal. It is unclear whether these three clones were created by two or three different networks of hijackers, or if this is just a marketing ploy of a single fraudulent publisher.
After one of us tweeted about the fraudsters accusing each other of being frauds, we found even more cloned versions. For those who know the history of the journal, how the original journal looks (such as this example from 2015), and its purpose as a trade publication instead of a scientific journal, then the fraud is pretty obvious. But the hijackers accusing each other of fraud is next-level deception.
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There is only one site that publish the trade journal Seybold and solid info can be found here https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-joss-group