Recently, we posted about the well-known issue of predatory publishers in academia. Increasingly, journals and publishers have to also contend with fraudulent/hijacked/copied websites. This is a breed of scam website that’s fast becoming endemic in the scholarly communications world. Bad actors set up a fake website using the branding and visuals of a legitimate publication and charge an article processing fee in exchange for speedy publication under false pretenses.

Last week, Liverpool University Press posted an informative post that serves as a cautionary tale.

Red flags first came about late last year, with authors raising concerns about incorrect Scopus listings and asking about APC charges for this Open Access publication, having come across a fraudulent version of one of their journal’s homepages.

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.

The blog post from LUP goes on to detail how they have tried to tackle the fraudulent site and have it taken down (spoiler: with great difficulty). The TLDR takeaways are:

• Think.Check.Submit. continues to be an invaluable resource in the world of scholarly communications, if in doubt run a title search on the site.
• Our faves at Retraction Watch also run a Hi-jacked Journal Checker.
• As ever, contact the Open Research team if you’re unsure about anything– we’re always happy to help! Open.research@UWL.ac.uk

Be wary out there!

 

Last week, Eilish headed to the UKSG annual conference in Glasgow (more on that later!). The keynote speaker for day one happened to be a UWL open research team favourite; Ivan Oransky, one of the creators of the Retraction Watch blog. Oransky is a distinguished journalist who has written on science and medicine for consumer and trade press for many years. When explaining his precis for starting the blog with his colleague, Adam Marcus, he cited a 2008 paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics:

Although retractions are on average occurring sooner after publication than in the past, citation analysis shows that they are not being recognised by subsequent users of the work. Findings suggest that editors and institutional officials are taking more responsibility for correcting the scientific record but that reasons published in the retraction notice are not always reliable. More aggressive means of notification to the scientific community appear to be necessary.

Retraction watch posts both daily and weekly newsletters and they’re well worth having in your inbox to keep tabs on the latest. You can subscribe and check out the website here.

Happy reading!