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Nowadays, web-based applications extend to all businesses due to their advantages and easy usability. The most important issue in web-based applications is security. Due to their advantages, most academic journals are now using these applications, with papers being submitted and published through their websites. As these websites are resources for knowledge, information security is primary for maintaining their integrity. In this opinion piece, we point out vulnerabilities in certain websites and introduce the potential for future threats. We intend to present how some journals are vulnerable and what will happen if a journal can be infected by attackers. This opinion is not a technical manual in information security, it is a short inspection that we did to improve the security of academic journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current status of academic publishing is worrying. Cybercriminals are now targeting academic audiences, making it necessary to inform both editors and authors about such issues. The latest involves bogus impact factors, which are challenging scholarly publishing. Legitimate impact factors are used by authors and editors to get a general idea of the audience, if any, for a particular piece or journal. The bogus metrics only add confusion in support of the cybercrimes of their initiators. In this paper, we discuss bogus impact factors, victim countries, and try to clarify the phenomena for both authors and editors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors discuss the integrity threats of the expanding open access (OA) movement. Topics include the predatory open access journals (POAJs), the publishing threats of hijacked journals and journal phishing, and the ethical implications of hijacked journals. Several charts are also presented which show the similarities and differences between phishing and hijacking, the hijacked journals from Google page ranking, and the metrics for citation level assessment of journals and researchers.