Exclusive: New hijacking scam targets Elsevier, Springer Nature, and other major publishers
Until recently, journal hijackers do not appear to have targeted titles from big publishers, in part because their well-known website designs made such clones easy to detect.
Typically, cloned versions of journals’ websites are of low quality and don’t resemble the recognizable and professional designs of Springer Nature and Elsevier. As described in previous posts, fraudulent publishers would usually copy the ISSN, title and other metadata of niche and university journals in order to avoid identification, and possibly index their unauthorized content in bibliographic databases such as Scopus or Web of Science.
We’ve cataloged over 300 such cloned journals in the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, a small number of which involve major publishers like Springer Nature, Elsevier and Wiley. For example, earlier this year the Journal of Academic Ethics and Machine Intelligence Research, both published by Springer Nature, were cloned.
But earlier this month, William Black, founder and CEO of PSIref, an online platform aggregating scholarly publication data which offers advertising opportunities for publishers, sent me evidence of a new, more sophisticated scam.
