July 2024 – Paul Cockburn and Clare Hooper.

In April this year, we published a blog to highlight the issues journals and publishers are facing from fraudulent/copied/hijacked sites.

This is a second, follow up post, to share further investigations and work we have been doing since.

Our further investigations

I would like to thank Paul Cockburn, our Journals Publishing Assistant, for his work on the detailed findings below. I have summarized his evidence.

The hijacked idpr.org.uk (hIDPR) was reregistered through Dynadot on 23 October 2023 and began publishing on 15 December 2023. As detailed in the first blog, we first became aware of hIDPR on 17 December 2023 when an author contacted us, asking why the IDPR (International Development Planning Review) Scopus listing for IDPR was incorrect.

hIDPR uses Online Journals System (OJS), open-source software developed by Public Knowledge Project.  We should clarify that PKP are not responsible for hosting the site, the site is using their software, which is free to use. This is good news for the smaller publishers or societies who also use it, but does mean that the software can also be taken advantage of by bad actors.

As of 20 May 2024, the website hosts 221 unique PDFs and 52 additional abstracts (without associated papers) – there are 6 duplicate articles.

• Most papers are in “22.2” and “23.1”, with 86 and 146 articles respectively (not all with PDFs), covering 15 December 2023 to 20 May 2024. Most prior issues contain only one article, often only an abstract.
• 103 PDFs (47%) are published by authors associated with Universities in India (beginning 15 December 2023). Of these, 9 are pulled from other publications (Based on title search and Google Scholar cross-reference).
• 94 are exclusive to hIDPR. 71 PDFs (32%) are published by authors associated with Universities in Iraq (beginning 12 January 2023). Of these, 1 is also published in the hijacked Journal of Research Administration, another 1 is also published in the predatory Journal of Psychology English, and 69 are exclusive to hIDPR.

Call for Papers
Multiple CfPs were published over Telegram, beginning 15 December 2023, the same day the first hIDPR PDFs were created. On this day, ‘Innovative Research & Solutions’, based in India, posted a CfP, quoting a 3-day turnaround for publication. This advert was reproduced in a channel titled ’Publication in Scopus/WOS/UGC/IEEE’, based in Singapore, 19 December 2023.  This latter channel posted a hIDPR CfP as recently as 30 April 2024. Other Telegram CfPs offered turnaround quotes between 2 and 10 days for hIDPR.

On 25 January 2024, ‘DR. JB Consultancy’ put out a hIDPR CfP on Facebook, alongside 18 other journals, 14 of which are known to be hijacked according to the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker (RWHJC).

Of the 71 hIDPR PDFs associated with Iraq, 29 are authored by members of the University of Baghdad (beginning 9 February 2024). Of these 29 papers, 27 are authored by associates of the College of Physical Education and Sport Sciences (COPE), 2 are by associates of the College of Education and Sports Sciences for Girls (COPEW).

One key finding was that all COPE/W articles are exclusive to hIDPR; they are not pulled from other repositories.

These findings indicate that hIDPR is being used for citation manipulation, involving COPE (more information on citation manipulation here: https://publicationethics.org/node/44351). In other words, it boosts citations of the department’s publication, Journal of Physical Education (JPE), and the H-Index of COPE authors (many of whom are published in both hIDPR and JPE).

• In the period 9 February to 20 May 2024, hIDPR cites JPE 1050 times over 39 articles, including 717 times over 27 articles authored by COPE members.
• 332 JPE citations are from papers associated with other Iraqi institutions. 1 is from an Indian institution.
• In the same period: JPE cites hIDPR 108 times over 13 articles.
• Of 148 unique emails scraped from hIDPR, 76 are associated with cope.uobaghdad.edu.iq or copew.uobaghdad.edu.iq.

We informed all authors that their work is hosted by a predatory journal. Of the 76 members of COPE/W contacted, none has responded.

The complexity of Perso-Arabic/Arabic transliteration made it difficult for Paul as a non-speaker/reader to match identities with absolute certainty. However, hIDPR publishes around 76 COPE/W members (inc. at least 60 faculty members, and 2 members of the JPE editorial board).

Some of these articles are incomprehensible, even accounting for translation. The following is attributed to 9 COPE members, including the Dean of the College, and the JPE Editor in Chief:

One of the necessities of implementation is to follow methods that  are based on and rely on information that is stored in an organized cognitive structure that is categorized in an orderly and gradual manner for a sequential work mechanism in a codified, scientific manner, the outputs of which are the encoding of information that will be the first work of the memory and reference to it at the time of implementation for skill performance in dealing with situations and variables of play and in an operational manner.

This article gives 10 citations to JPE.

Further Evidence

The argument for a networked citation farm is supported by the frequency with which hIDPr cites other journals listed as hijacked by RWHJC:

Pakistan Heart Journal cited 104 times in hIDPR

Semiconductor Optoelectronics cited 34 times in hIDPR

Annals of the Romanian Society for Cell Biology cited 30 times in hIDPR

Turkish Journal of Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation cited 6 times in hIDPR

Semiconductor Optoelectronics was included in the ‘DR. JB Consultancy’ CfP on 25 January 2024.

Summary
Opportunists identified the lapsed IDPR.ORG.UK domain in October 2023. They host hIDPR as part of a network of hijacked journals which may operate as an APC farm. We have conflicting accounts of pricing: an author told us they were charged $180, Paul was quoted $250 when posing as a potential author with a Chat GPT generated paper, we have also had reports of authors being charged $2000. CfPs for hIDPR are advertised over Telegram and Facebook.

As of February 2024, COPE took advantage of hIDPR to operate citation manipulation for JPA (and to host a citation cartel). COPE members author hIDPR articles citing JPE and list both publications on their Google Scholar and ResearchGate pages. This operation partially explains why the site is still publishing after having disabled the registration function. No COPE member has responded to advice that hIDPR is predatory.

Irrelevant IDPR submissions may not be spam but rather made under the impression that IDPR will serve as a citation/paper mill as advertised on social media.

Fake CfPs circulate as recently as 30 April 2024 and our efforts to improve the SEO and indexing of our website might drive morepeople to submit irrelevant articles. This should eventually, however, exhaust the incentive to repost fake CfPs.

All of this explains why our editorial team have been receiving submissions related to sports science — and to cat influenza in Baghdad. The extreme turnarounds quoted in fake CfPs (as little as 2 days) explain author’s impatience.

What’s next?

• We contacted Dynadot to notify them that hIDPR was a predatory, abusive site. There has been no response.
• We shared our findings with the IDPR Editors. They state “As editors, we are incredibly grateful for the investigative work that has been done to identify how this issue has arisen and the steps taken to address this and its impacts on the journal. We strongly encourage all scholars looking to publish in any journal – whether IDPR or any other – to think and check before submitting to ensure they don’t fall victim to hijacked journals.”
• We reiterated to JPE editors that their authors’ work is published in hIDPR and that it is predatory.
• In the future, we will monitor Telegram groups which publicise predatory outlets, cloned journals, and fake CfPs.
• We are planning to reach out to hIDPR authors whose emails are not listed to advise them on predatory journals.
• We have searched the internet for broken backlinks to our journals, and made sure these are fixed, to avoid potential future vulnerabilities.
• We must reiterate to our authors the importance of https://thinkchecksubmit.org/
• Google – after an extensive discussion with Google, where we demonstrated in detail how hIDPR was infringing copyright and taking advantage of authors, Google have agreed that “In response to your copyright removal request and in accordance with applicable copyright laws in the relevant jurisdiction, we’ll remove these URLs from our search results globally”.

In conclusion
Open-source software makes it easy for those not working in traditional larger publishing houses to generate professional-looking journal platforms. We should celebrate this as a victory for equity in the sector (especially for small or Society presses). We must accept, however, that this also makes it easier for predatory journals to quickly produce convincing platforms without any industry knowledge (or even website design skills).

Without challenging the metrification of research and the value placed on citations across the sector, this problem is not likely to go away any time soon. In terms of discipline, this may be more of a STEM than an HSS issue but it’s important to note that Paul noted a lot of HSS paper author-slots for sale on Telegram.

Finally, generative AI is relevant to this conversation. The content on the sites mentioned above seems to been created using AI – again, a tool used by bad actors to create content quickly and easily.

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