This blog is being published in order to highlight the issues journals and publishers are facing from fraudulent/copied/hijacked sites.

Wikipedia describes journal hijacking as “the brandjacking of a legitimate academic journal by a malicious third party. Typically, the imposter journal sets up a fraudulent website for the purpose of offering scholars the opportunity to rapidly publish their research online for a fee” (para. 1, 2023).

We hope this post will provide clarity for the journal’s subscribers, readers and authors, and will be useful for other publishers.

We also, as a mission driven University Press, want to be as transparent as possible. 

Fraudulent journal site

The first indication something was amiss came in the form of an email from an author on 17^th December 2023, asking why the journal Scopus listing was incorrect – pointing out (correctly) that it was our responsibility as publishers to keep the details up to date. After requesting the listing be amended, we assumed this was a simple error.

Established by Liverpool University Press in 1979, International Development Planning Review (IDPR) is published Open Access under our LUP Open Planning ‘Subscribe to Open’ agreement, meaning that there are no APCs (Article Publishing Charge) for authors. When an author contacted us to enquire how much the journal APC was on 20^th December, and supplied the following website as part of our conversation with them – https://idpr.org.uk/index.php/idpr/index – we became concerned.

This was a clone of the journal’s own homepage – containing the journal branding, requesting (and accepting) submissions, and displaying content. The content seemed to be nonsense, and had not been taken from our site, but the site was very convincing. Our concern was not that genuine IDPR content was being scraped, but that someone posing as the editor of the journal was accepting papers and liaising with authors.

Step 1

Our first step was to email the ‘Editor’ with a take-down notice. We informed them that “a CC-BY-ND license permits reuse and sharing of the open access content it does not permit the hosting of the material on any sites fraudulently purporting to be the journal. This is a deceptive practice that is damaging to both the journal’s and the publisher’s reputation”– even more confusingly, the email bounced.

Step 2

We contacted the Public Knowledge Project and asked for advice – they were very helpful:

I sympathize with your current predicament – it is an increasingly common situation we are seeing globally. The journal in question does appear to use Open Journal Systems (OJS), which is developed by the Public Knowledge Project (PKP).  However, OJS is open source and freely downloadable and usable by anyone, without direct involvement by our team. As such, we cannot act directly to manage or otherwise intervene where it is being used as a tool by others. I can confirm that our own journal hosting service, PKP Publishing Services, is in no way involved in managing that particular domain, and we do not provide hosting or other services to this group.

They recommended that we report the journal to the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, which lists hijacked journals – the journal is now listed there but we are unsure how many authors are aware.

They also recommended that we “report the fraudulent site on this page to request to have it excluded from Google’s main and Scholar search results.”

Sites such as the above come and go with some speed, so I’d encourage you to think of this not so much as an issue with this site specifically, but as an ongoing general concern that will require some information literacy from your readership (as well as across the scholarly landscape more generally). We recommend supporting efforts such as Think. Check. Submit. (http://thinkchecksubmit.org/) in this regard.

Google have not been particularly helpful, responding to my queries with a request of ‘proof of ownership of copyright’ stating that ‘copyright in a creative work is generally owned by the person who created it’. They have ignored our assertions that Liverpool University Press owns the journal and all associated copyrights (branding, cover design, ISSN etc) stating that they cannot delist the fake journal site, as we are not the ‘creators’. 

In the meantime, our journal editors started receiving a number of spam submissions and emails, plus a couple offering to buy the journal (!). Our editors started blocking/deleting/ignoring. Author queries were responded to quickly, and most quoted the fake site.

Looking ahead

By mid January 2024, the Editors of IDPR were receiving 3-6 submissions a day on ‘dog breeding’, lung cancer, cricket games, cat influenza in Baghdad etc. They continue to delete and block.

Our authors continue to contact us as publishers and the editors to ask where/whether an APC should be paid, and we continue to advise. They are also being sent fake acceptance letters and contacting us to check.

It appeared the journal’s Scholar One site was affected. The “Journal Home” link seemed to have changed to the fraudulent site – Scholar One were initially unable to tell us how this could have happened but subsequently their technical team ran investigations on our behalf, finding that this was a (very) old site previously used by our journal, but purchased by others in 2022.

We are not alone in the issues we have been facing. We note that the problem has become so serious, that SCOPUS has removed links to the homepages of all the journals it indexes – https://retractionwatch.com/2023/12/28/elseviers-scopus-deletes-journal-links-following-revelations-of-hijacked-indexed-journals/ from Retraction Watch.   

This blog piece has been put together to share with all our authors and readers to make them aware, and to alert other publishers of our size to this predatory practice.

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International Development Planning Review is a peer-reviewed journal which provides an interdisciplinary platform for the critical study of development related practices, planning and policy in the global South.

The journal publishes theoretically informed and empirically grounded papers, critical reviews, and viewpoints.

The latest issue has just been published – https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/toc/idpr/current and the editors continue to welcome submissions in the field.

The journal’s impact factor was 1.6 in 2022 and the CiteScore was 3.6.

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Editors’ statements

“We hope that this blog is shared widely to alert researchers, readers, and editors of other journals, to the growing problem of copycat journal websites.

As editors, we are very concerned about the direct effects of this attack on anyone who may have submitted to the fake site.

We are also concerned about the wider impact on the journal: IDPR is run by a small team, for whom a hacking attack like this represents a significant burden of extra work, as well as the loss of a range of genuine submissions and the continued existence of a fraudulent site using our branding.

IDPR has always offered close support to our contributors, particularly to early career researchers and those writing from the Global South, and perhaps our best response to this attack is to reiterate this as a central part of how the journal operates.

We’d therefore like to assure potential authors that they can get in touch with the editorial team directly at any stage of the publication process – from pitching ideas to discussing reviewers’ comments – and receive a personal, professional and constructive response. IDPR values this dialogue as it contributes to the quality of our output, and more generally to upholding the relationships of trust on which academic publishing so heavily depends.

We would also strongly encourage all authors – whether for IDPR or any other legitimate academic journal – to double-check the authenticity of webpages and submission links before submitting their work to avoid falling victim to this type of scam.”

https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/journal/idpr

Clare Hooper, Director of Journals Publishing, LUP.

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