Predatory publishing, hijacking of legitimate journals and impersonation of researchers via special issue announcements: a warning for editors and authors about a new scam

How do Clarivate Analytics and Publons propose to fortify peer review in the COVID-19 era?

“…To compound this exploitative state, academia and academic publishing are currently experiencing a state of ‘fake’, including the abuse and fraud of peer review. 6 , 7 It was hoped that a tool developed by Clarivate Analytics would be successful in combatting fraud in peer review. c However, the tool has failed to do so and its metrics arguably show biases and problems, as has been found for other research evaluation indicators.…”

Academic journals' usernames and the threat of fraudulent accounts on social media

“…In the case of journal hijacking, criminals have made the effort to convince Thomson Reuters to add links to their fake websites for legitimate journals onto the master journal list (Jalalian & Dadkhah, 2015). In one case study, Trapp (2020) reports how hijackers have identified email addresses and profiles of legitimate academics, create fake copies of these digital identities, and contacted a journal to lead special issues, assumedly to demand money for publishing articles. These hijackers engaged professionally with the journal and were identified as frauds due to their email addresses having slight differences to the legitimate email addresses (Trapp, 2020).…”

“…In one case study, Trapp (2020) reports how hijackers have identified email addresses and profiles of legitimate academics, create fake copies of these digital identities, and contacted a journal to lead special issues, assumedly to demand money for publishing articles. These hijackers engaged professionally with the journal and were identified as frauds due to their email addresses having slight differences to the legitimate email addresses (Trapp, 2020). In a similar study, Dadkhah et al (2018) illustrates how hijackers have faked academic profiles, websites and email addresses of legitimate researchers in attempts to influence the peer review process.…”

“…Other forms of deception can be found in the use of fraudulent email addresses (Dadkhah et al, 2017), the impersonation of researchers (Trapp, 2020), and, of course, the vast number of spam emails that academics typically receive (Memon, 2018; Mercier et al, 2018; Teixeira da Silva et al, 2020).…”

Challenges for the Academic Editor in the Scientific Publication

“…The context of scientific publication -which is critical for the dissemination of scientific knowledge (Wong, 2019;Baffy et al, 2020) -, while being an industry with an annual with a turnover of millions of dollars and euros in one year (Pagliaro, 2019;Banks et al, 2018;Kortabarria, 2019), is undergoing a deep change (Trapp, 2019) with the unstoppable Open Access (Ghanbari Baghestan et al, 2019;Tenopir et al, 2016;Miguel, Tannuri de Oliveira, & Cabrini Grácio, 2016;Baffy et al, 2020;Kortabarria, 2019). Six dimensions may be highlighted on this important phenomenon -as an illustration, and without being exhaustive, but that can be developed by consulting the literature on this topic -, which academic editors will have to address, as depicted in Table 1.…”