The case of the stolen journal

When you think of valuable items to steal, you might imagine cash, cars, or jewelry. But what about journals?

That’s what my colleagues and I from Disseropedia, the journals project of Dissernet, which was created to fight plagiarism in Russia, recently found.

The story begins when my Dissernet colleague Andrei Rostovtsev discovered several cases of translation plagiarism and gifted co-authorship in the articles submitted to the journal Talent Development and Excellence by Russian scholars. Those cases are available at these four links. 

Such cases are unfortunately all too common. “Authors” purchase plagiarized articles originally written in Russian and poorly translated into English by manuscript mills that sell co-authorship and help “authors” to submit manuscripts in predatory journals indexed in Scopus or Web of Science databases. As is the case in many countries, during the last decade Russian scholars have rapidly increased their publications in predatory journals in order to meet the new employment requirements and, in some cases, earn a financial bonus. Detecting translation plagiarism is extremely difficult, so manuscript mills thrive. 

That was one red flag in this case: In 2020, Talent Development and Excellence has already managed to index in Scopus 462 articles, nearly 90 from Russian scholars, more than in all previous years since 2009. Most Russian authors of the articles in this journal are affiliated with universities which produce the most predatory journal articles in the country. 

Then things became more strange. We noticed — on the very strange website of the journal —  that the title had been changed ever-so-slightly from Talent Development and Excellence to  Journal of Talent Development and Excellence. However, the content of the archive is fully consistent with the original title’s issues. The section “Editorial board” is empty. And what is more suspicious is that there is no ISSN mentioned on the website.

It became obvious that the real journal’s website had been stolen, in many ways not unlike previous cases documented by John Bohannon in 2015. Wilma Vialle, the original journal’s associate editor, told me:

Our website (iratde.org) was hacked and all our website files removed, including those associated with our online journal‘ Talent Development and Excellence ’. We are still in the process of rebuilding our website at a different domain. Since then, however, a fraudulent individual has stolen all the content from our site and set up a fraudulent site at iratde.com, with all references to iratde removed and replaced with ‘Journal of Talent Development and Excellence’ – note, that was NOT the name of our journal, they added ‘Journal of’.

What takes the cake is the sock puppetry. The fake journal’s website warns:

Dear researchers and authors, this has came in our notice that there are some clone websites which has similar domain name like our journal that are advertising by Fake Call for papers. 

Yes: Fake journal warns potential authors about fake calls for papers on their clone website.

Recently, Scopus excluded a number of predatory journals popular among Russian scholars. Perhaps this fake journal is next.

Anna Abalkina is a researcher at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München and a volunteer at Dissernet.

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