Journal hijacking refers to the
brandjacking of a legitimate
academic journal
An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and ...
by a malicious third party. Typically the imposter journal sets up a fraud website for the purpose of offering
scholars the opportunity to rapidly publish their research online for a
fee
A fee is the price one pays as remuneration for rights or services. Fees usually allow for overhead, wages, costs, and markup. Traditionally, professionals in the United Kingdom (and previously the Republic of Ireland) receive a fee in cont ...
.
[ The term hijacked journal may refer to either the fraud or the legitimate journal. The fraudulent journals are also known as "clone journals". Similar hijacking can occur with academic conferences.][
]
Background
In 2012, cyber criminals
A cybercrime is a crime that involves a computer or a computer network.Moore, R. (2005) "Cyber crime: Investigating High-Technology Computer Crime," Cleveland, Mississippi: Anderson Publishing. The computer may have been used in committing the ...
began hijacking print-only journals by registering a domain name and creating a fake website under the title of the legitimate journals.scammer
A confidence trick is an attempt to defraud a person or group after first gaining their trust. Confidence tricks exploit victims using their credulity, naïveté, compassion, vanity, confidence, irresponsibility, and greed. Researchers have de ...
s find their victims in conference proceedings
In academia and librarianship, conference proceedings is a collection of academic papers published in the context of an academic conference or workshop. Conference proceedings typically contain the contributions made by researchers at the conferen ...
, extracting authors' emails from papers and sending them fake calls for papers.
There have also been instances of journal hijacking wherein hijackers take over the journal's existing domain name after the journal publisher neglects to pay the domain name registration fees on time.
See also
* :Hijacked journals
*Confidence trick
A confidence trick is an attempt to defraud a person or group after first gaining their trust. Confidence tricks exploit victims using their credulity, naïveté, compassion, vanity, confidence, irresponsibility, and greed. Researchers have ...
*Passing off
Passing off is a common law tort which can be used to enforce unregistered trade mark rights. The tort of passing off protects the goodwill of a trader from misrepresentation.
The law of passing off prevents one trader from misrepresenting go ...
*Predatory open access publishing
Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors without checking articles for quality and legitimacy, and withou ...
References
Bibliography
*
*
External links
*American librarian Jeffrey Beall
Jeffrey Beall is an American librarian and library scientist, best known for drawing attention to " predatory open access publishing", a term he coined, and for creating what is now widely known as Beall's list, a list of potentially predatory ...
'
hijacked journal and authentic journal listHijacked Journal Checker
Internet fraud
Academic publishing
Ethically disputed research practices
Ethically disputed business practices
Deception
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