Hijacked Journals: An Emerging Challenge for Scholarly Publishing

Abstract

Much has been written about the problem of predatory journals, which encourage would-be authors to publish in unknown, poorly reviewed journals—for a price.1,2 There are websites that list such “journals,” offering a quick check on reliability.3 Mostly, these journals are distinguished by a lack of peer review and large volumes of publishing. Predatory journals also have extremely high acceptance rates and article publication charges. They usually have nonexistent impact factors because they are not indexed by Thomson Reuters. This is because, by not offering much useful information, such nondescript journals are seldom cited. Now, a new, even more pernicious scam has entered the realm of scholarly publication: hijacked journals. Hijacked journals are fake websites of authentic ones, utilizing the title and ISSNs of reputable journals.4 Compared with predatory journals, hijacked journals are more likely to receive papers from authors, because they mimic reputable journals, generally claiming the impact factors that those journals have earned from Thomson Reuters. Predatory journals often claim to have impact factors, but they usually have bogus metrics such as Universal Impact Factor, Global Impact Factor, and so on. If we want to present a correlation between hijacked journals and predatory ones, we can say that article broker companies provide papers for both hijacked journals and predatory publishers. Table 1 compares the URLs of some authentic journals with those of the corresponding websites of the hijacked journals. Each of these are medical journals, including Emergencias (an emergency medicine journal from Spain), the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Vitae (the Official Publication of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Antioquia, Colombia), Terapevticheskii Arkhiv (from Russia), Kardiologiya (from Russia), and Revue Scientifique et Technique (published by the World Organization for Animal Health).5 Hijackers try to hijack journals for which it is hard for researchers to find the authentic website; thus, non-English journals published by small publishers can be a good option for them.

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