Journal Scam Targets Top Science Publishers

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.

It's their own fault.

[J. L. Tympanum]

They have only themselves to blame. Their ridiculously high prices literally invite this kind of stuff.

Spams and Scams

[Roger W Moore]

I regularly get scams sometimes asking me to submit to journals but mainly to attend scam conferences. What I do not understand is how these scams flourish. I would never determine a journal to publish in because of an email advertizing it. In some way though Nature and other publishers opened the door to this by agressively advertizing their journals a few years ago that started to normalize getting emails from publishers hoping to persuade you to publish in their journal. My best advice is to ignore any email you get trying to persuade you to publish in a journal: it's either spam or a scam and either way you are better just deleting it.

Re:Spams and Scams

[godrik]

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:

[Roger W Moore]

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

Re:

[amorsen]

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:

[hdyoung]

You seem to be an on-the-ball scientist, probably working at reputable STEM institution. You are not the target of these places. You will not fall for this stuff, and they don't want your attention at all because they want to skate under the radar while they target STEM workers at lower-tier institutions, mostly but not totally outside the west.

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

Yawn!

[methano]

The biggest scam is from the publishers themselves. There are probably 20 times as many journals as there were 30 years ago. The publishers would have you believe that's to cover all the good science, but there's probably little more quality science now than 30 years ago. Probably 90% of it should not have been published. Having a few more completely fraudulent journals doesn't even perturb the system.