Journal Scam Targets Top Science Publishers (retractionwatch.com) 16
Major academic publishers including Elsevier and Springer Nature are grappling with a sophisticated new journal hijacking scam that precisely mimics their websites to deceive researchers.
The fraudulent operation, reported by Retraction Watch, has cloned at least 13 legitimate journals through fake domains, according to Crossref data. The scam, the publication reports, features high-quality website clones that replicate even cookie consent popups. The operation assigns its own DOI prefix to published papers and offers paper-writing and peer review services typical of paper mills.
The fraudulent operation, reported by Retraction Watch, has cloned at least 13 legitimate journals through fake domains, according to Crossref data. The scam, the publication reports, features high-quality website clones that replicate even cookie consent popups. The operation assigns its own DOI prefix to published papers and offers paper-writing and peer review services typical of paper mills.
It's their own fault. (Score:5, Insightful)
They have only themselves to blame. Their ridiculously high prices literally invite this kind of stuff.
Spams and Scams (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Spams and Scams (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, it is very easy to understand. You would not fall for that because you (if googling your login point to the right person) have been doing research for 30 years.
There are many universities which at this point require students (PhD, but also some MS) to have published papers to graduate. So if you are a not too bright student, you might be tempted to pay for publications in these venues. If no ones pays too much attention, it will appear legitimate enough, you'll graduate and move on with your life.
There are also a set of third world country students who are trying to get in a program in the US. And they believe that having papers on their resume will increase their chance of getting into a US PhD program. Now they often don't understand how the whole thing work and so think that all published papers count the same. And so these type of venues are pretty straight forward.
The third type I have seen is from companies trying to pretend they are doing science. Send a paper to these garbage places, it will be published. You will be able to say that there is a scientific paper that validates that what you are doing make sense. And that can help you finding customers or investors. In general, I see that locally at $LOCAL_UNIVERSITY, my students may doubt a random blog post. But they believe a lot more easily something that is latex formatted. (That usually leads to lots of discussion on how to verify validity.)
Re:Spams and Scams (Score:4, Insightful)
You would not fall for that because you (if googling your login point to the right person) have been doing research for 30 years.
Yes, but even when I was junior I would not have fallen for these things either since, due to talking with my PhD supervisor, experimental colleagues etc. I knew the journals to publish in and I would not have trusted some fancy spam telling me otherwise, or at least not without talking with someone more knowledgable about it first.
So if you are a not too bright student, you might be tempted to pay for publications in these venues.
Again I do not get this. First PhD students have no funds to pay for publication, your supervisor does that if needed, and second since your supervisor is almost certainly a co-author on the paper with you surely they will provide some guidance on where to publish? That was the case for me when I was a student and is now the case for my students - they are not making the decision on their own.
If the people falling for this are PhD students making decisions on where to publish with zero input from their supervisor and who are paying for it our of their own pocket then the problem here is a serious lack of supervision. I can certainly imagine there may be a few cases like that but on a large enough scale to support this sort of scam? That seems unlikely based on my experience.
Re: (Score:2)
> I can certainly imagine there may be a few cases like that but on a large enough scale to support this sort of scam?
Quick search suggests the following ballpark figures.
There are 6.1 million graduate students in the EU, 4 million in India, 3.5 million in China, 3.2 million in the US, with millions more in South America, the African continent, and the rest of Asia, perhaps 20 million in total world wide.
There are over 30,000 academic journals. Say half the graduate students need to publish in order to g
Wildly Wrong Estimates (Score:2)
Exceedingly few high quality journals consistently publish 167 articles per year
True, most of them publish far, far more than that. Physical Review Letters, one of physics' top general journals, 2,185 papers [aps.org] last year. Physical Review D a top journal for particles and fiedls published 4,245 papers [aps.org]. PhysRevB was just over 5.000 papers in 2023. So you are a factor fo 20-50 off with your estimate of how many papers are published.
Next your grad student numbers are counting MSc students who often take course-based programs with zero publication requirements and even thesis-based MScs r
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
My slashdot-specific email is the one that receives the scam conference mails. That has been going on for almost the entire time I have had this account.
Re:Spams and Scams (Score:5, Insightful)
I've complained about this before. I have colleagues who work at universities in 2nd and 3rd world countries who are desperate to publish. Their job depends on it. Their university gives them almost zero resources, they have almost no legit graduate programs, the local students that attend are mostly subpar because any halfway decent STEM student flees the country at the first opportunity. There's civil war with artillery and missiles going off within a few tens of kilometers of the campus and government is nearly broke. Forget research equipment. They can't even keep the lights on.
However, their university still requires them to publish X articles per year, and Y% of those articles need to be in a "Q1" or "Q2" journal, and they need to have "evidence of prominence in their field at the international level".
That is simply not going to happen. Publishing in the top journals is very competitive and these people are going toe-to-toe with all the R1 institutions across the planet. It's like they're playing in a pro-tennis match and their country sends them with a ping-pong paddle.
So, an entire ecosystem of fraudulent or semi-fraudulent journals and conferences have evolved to meet their needs. I'm not justifying it. However, if you demand that a person publish or perish but give them zero resources or support, and send them out to compete with the pros, they will use whatever tools they can get their hands on, in order to survive. Ethics, rules, laws, and morals be damned.
If you put people in stupid situations, you'll get stupid results.
Re: (Score:1)
Yawn! (Score:4, Insightful)
But, how can you tell? (Score:1)
Someone call me when any one of those publishers actually insists on independent replication before publishing.
Number of journals and explain rankings (Score:3)
Can someone explain the quality/reputation ranking of academic journals and also shed light on vanity journals/predatory journals.
Some information on grouping of academic researchers who frequently cite each other's work would be helpful.
https://www.spiked-online.com/... [spiked-online.com]
Getting on the editorial board of a journal in your research area is great for your career. You can mix with other career-minded academics in your field, and you get to have some say in what the journal does and what its focus is on.
The real payoff, to ensure it is worth the free labour, is that you and your colleagues can use the journal to advance each others’ standing. Editorial boards are filled with like-minded academics who publish research that aligns with their interests. Articles are also peer-reviewed (again for free) by other academics with the same interests. Meanwhile, when writing their papers, academics are always sure to cite each others’ work. This is the circle-jerk in action.
https://www.science.org/conten... [science.org]
In recent years, the number of papers being published has “grown exponentially,” the team explains. In 2016, about 1.92 million papers were indexed by the Scopus and Web of Science publication databases. In 2022, that number had jumped to 2.82 million. And this leap happened even as the number of newly awarded PhDs leveled off and declined. That means that, on average, each scientist is writing, editing, and reviewing more papers, they say—a problem they dub “the strain on scientific publishing.”
According to the team’s data, a handful of publishers—MDPI, Elsevier, Frontiers, Springer-Nature, and Wiley—account for more than 70% of the increase in articles per year. In fact, MDPI alone is responsible for 27% of the increase. There’s a single reason for that, according to a Bluesky post from first author Mark Hanson: “I could be nuanced (it's in the paper!). But let’s be frank: it’s special issues.”
Suggestion (Score:2)
Research done at universities, colleges and centers which receive any federal, state or local grant money be required to deposit a royalty free copy of the research papers, research data set, questionnaires, etc.in a free to the public without registration electronic repository.
The general public and search engines should be able to web spider the repository without fees, charges, registration, etc.
The research papers could be published normally in Nature and other journals as they are done today.
ArXiV, sci-hub, and legislation (Score:1)