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At the moment, the academic world is faced with various challenges that negatively impact science integrity. One is hijacked journals, a second, inauthentic website for indexed legitimate journals, managed by cybercriminals. These journals publish any manuscript by charging authors and pose a risk to scientific integrity. This piece compares a journal's original and hijacked versions regarding authority in search engines. A list of 16 medical journals, along with their hijacked versions, has been collected. The MOZ Domain Authority has been used to check the authority of both original and hijacked journals, and the results have been discussed. It indicates that hijacked journals are gaining more credibility than original ones. This should alarm academia and highlights a need for serious action against hijacked journals. The related policies should be planned, and tools should be developed to support easy detection of hijacked journals. On the publishers' side, the visibility of journals' websites must be enhanced to address this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Nowadays, many studies discuss scholarly publishing and associated challenges, but the problem of hijacked journals has been neglected. Hijacked journals are cloned websites that mimic original journals but are managed by cybercriminals. The present study uses a topic modeling approach to analyze published papers in hijacked versions of medical journals. Methods: A total of 3384 papers were downloaded from 21 hijacked journals in the medical domain and analyzed by topic modeling algorithm. Results: Results indicate that hijacked versions of medical journals are published in most fields of the medical domain and typically respect the primary domain of the original journal. Conclusion: The academic world is faced with the third-generation of hijacked journals, and their detection may be more complex than common ones. The usage of artificial intelligence (AI) can be a powerful tool to deal with the phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Invalid journals are recent challenges in the academic world and many researchers are unacquainted with the phenomenon. The number of victims appears to be accelerating. Researchers might be suspicious of predatory journals because they have unfamiliar names, but hijacked journals are imitations of well-known, reputable journals whose websites have been hijacked. Hijacked journals issue calls for papers via generally laudatory emails that delude researchers into paying exorbitant page charges for publication in a nonexistent journal. This paper presents a method for detecting hijacked journals by using a classification algorithm. The number of published articles exposing hijacked journals is limited and most of them use simple techniques that are limited to specific journals. Hence we needed to amass Internet addresses and pertinent data for analyzing this type of attack. We inspected the websites of 104 scientific journals by using a classification algorithm that used criteria common to reputable journals. We then prepared a decision tree that we used to test five journals we knew were authentic and five we knew were hijacked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, identity theft has been growing in the academic world. Cybercriminals create fake profiles for prominent scientists in attempts to manipulate the review and publishing process. Without permission, some fraudulent journals use the names of standout researchers on their editorial boards in the effort to look legitimate. This opinion piece, highlights some of the usual types of identity theft and their role in spreading junk science. Some general guidelines that editors and researchers can use against such attacks are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The academic world today includes hijacked journals and predatory publishers that operate based on a ‘pay and publish’ model and function for financial reasons only. Here we present lesser known aspects and practices of these journals to researchers, showing the core of the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predatory journals are a well-known issue for scholarly publishing and they are repositories for bogus research. In recent years, the number of predatory journals has risen and it is necessary to present a solution for this challenge. In this paper, we will discuss about a possible ranking of predatory journals. Our ranking approach is based on Beall's criteria for detection of predatory journals and it can help editors to improve their journals or convert their questionable journals to non-predatory ones. Moreover, our approach could help young editors to protect their journals against predatory practice. Finally, we present a case study to clarify our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]