Predatory and Fake Scientific Journals/Publishers – A Global Outbreak with Rising Trend: A Review

In recent times some publishers are intensively exploiting the model of open access publishing. During the last several years, studies have shown that there was a substantial increase in the number of fake publishers and hijacked journals. These cyber criminals make money by stealing the identities of legitimate journals and collecting the article processing charges on the papers that are submitted. This is all accomplished by a well developed framework that includes web development steps, intensive e-mail marketing and victim selections. This review article strives to recommend that the Beall’s list of predatory publishers and journals should be consulted every time when an author plans to submit scientific work to some of the journals that are indexed by Thomson Reuters/Institute for Scientific Information-ISI and covered by the Journal Citation Report. Also, the authors are advised to be “up to date” with new information regarding this controversial topic by informing themselves through various websites and specialized scientific portals. The review paper itself strives to summarize the most recent investigations on predatory and spurious journals/publishers which affect the entire scientific community, thus representing an outbreak with rising trend not only on national and regional level, but on global


Introduction
In the academic sphere of publishing some publishers are exploiting the model of open access publishing. This means that these publishers may accept the manuscripts that are flawed in terms of scientific and/ or scholarly quality or charge substantial fees to authors without providing essential editorial and publishing services. These publishers are known as predatory open access journal publishers. This provocative term "predatory open access" was conceived by Jeffrey Beall, Associate Professor and Scholarly Initiatives Li-brarian, Auraria Library, University of Colorado Denver, USA (Beall, 2012;Rahman, et al., 2014).
Journal hijacking has become an important issue in the academic world. During the last several years, studies have shown that there was a substantial increase in the number of fake publishers and hijacked journals (e.g. "Wulfenia Journal", "Archives des Sciences", "Jökull Journal", "Bothalia", "Pensée Journal", "Sylwan", "Ciencia e tecnica vitivinicola", "CADMO" etc). The academic community has read with great interest the paper published in the journal "Nature" in which Declan Butler reported two sham journals that were scamming authors (Butler, 2013). According to Butler (2013), two print-only journals that do not offer electronic versions (only hard copy version) were hijacked by cyber criminals. The hijackers set up fake websites and took money from authors who were attempting to publish their original research work in one of the journals indexed by Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), a Thomson Reuters metric product that compiles impact factors (IF) for covered journals (Jalalian, Mahboobi, 2014).
Hijackers make money by stealing the identities of legitimate journals and collecting the article processing charges on the papers that are submitted. According to the recent research of Jalalian and Mahboobi (2014), the cybercriminals have cheated thousands of professors and Ph.D. scholars (mostly from developing countries) and those who were in the urgent need of publishing their articles in journals that are covered by the Journal Citation Report (a Thomson Reuters product). The fake scientific journals targeted their potential victims using smart ideas both in web development steps, e-mail marketing and victim selections, thus making themselves hard to distinguish from the authentic journals. Usually the target groups of the cyber criminals are journals with not so high impact factor value (IF), because it would be difficult for the hijackers to convince the authors that a high impact factor journal invited them to publish their research work, with peer review process done within just a couple of weeks. Unfortunately, claiming a low impact factor (> 0.0) on the fake website is good enough for authors who are trying to get their work published in a Thomson Reuters indexed journal in the shortest possible time (Jalalian, Mahboobi, 2013;2014).
Also, respectable journal "Science" published the controversial article written by John Bohannon, a biologist and science journalist based at Harvard University. Bohannon's paper addresses the research in which author himself applied to different open-access publishers by submitting a fake scientific article to a large number of fee-charging open-access journals, revealing that less than 40% were living up to their promise of rigorously peer-reviewing what is published (Bohannon, 2013). The news about this research quickly echoed through the entire scientific community making the spotlight and posing some important questions regarding the ethics in scientific publishing and quality of academic research in general.
This review paper strives to summarize the most recent investigation on this important topic which affects the entire scientific community, thus representing a global outbreak with rising trend.

Hijacked Scientific Journalsa tool for cyber criminals
Stories about fake websites that deceive people into paying for "goods that are never delivered" have been mentioned for many years. Today, a quality research work is only considered as such if it is published in journals that have an impact factor (IF), thus making the academic publishers shifting from a traditional business model to an open-access model (Jalalian, Mahboobi, 2014). All this have made it profitable enough for scammers to add a new line in their business: "Real Money from Fake Journals" (e.g. Beall, 2012;Butler, 2013;Jalalian, Mahboobi, 2014).
As presented in the study of Jalalian and Mahboobi (2014), during the last several years, observations pointed out that cyber criminals have started to imitate the names of respectable scientific journals that publish only printed versions of articles. Such spurious journals involved not only some relatively young journals, but also journals with long tradition in publishing such as "Wulfenia Journal" and "Archives des Sciences" respectively ( Figure 1).
Investigating these kinds of fake journals, Jalalian and Mahboobi (2014) found evidence of the hijacking of "Jökull Journal" from Iceland, a South Africanbased journal entitled "Bothalia" and an old French journal "Pensée Journal", all of which have their impact factor compiled by Journal Citation Report (JCR) (IF varied from 0.017 to 1.067). Recent investigations noticed one more active spurious journal with hijacked website (http://scholarlyoa.com/2014/05/02/ red-alert-polish-scholarly-journal-is-hijacked/), "Sylwan", one of the oldest scientific journals in the world covering forestry topics, established in 1820 as the semi-official representative of the Royal Forestry Corps in Poland (IF 0.295). Since 1966 it has been published by the Polish Forestry Society (http://sylwan. ibles.waw.pl/pls/apex/f?p=SYLWAN:profil:0:::::/) (Figure 2). The hijacked version of the website purports to be the "English Edition" of the journal. Also, cyber criminals edited the Wikipedia article to add the counterfeit web address and distributed a call for papers to the academic public via e-mail, spamming for article submissions. Unfortunately, the indication is that this number of active spurious journals will likely continue to grow and expand on global level (Jalalian, Mahboobi, 2014).
The most incredible thing is that cyber criminals are acting in a very fast way. Only during month of June and July 2014 the report from Dr. Mehrdad Jalalian, who is actively involved in research of publication ethics in academic journalism, indicated big hijack of at least seven scientific journals such as: "Natura" from Netherlands, "Doriana" from Italy, "Cahiers Des Sciences Naturelles" from Switzerland, and "Mexican Journal of international studies" from Mexico. The hijackers cheated the Thomson Reuters by providing a web link to their fake website. Also, the "Journal of Balkan Tribological Association" from Bulgaria, "Ciencia e tecnica vitivinicola" from Portugal and "CADMO" (Giornale italiano di Pedagogia sperimentale/ Italian Journal of Experimental Pedagogy) from Italy have been hijacked by the cyber criminals as well (http://www.mehrdadjalalian.com/). Spatial distribution of some recently hijacked scientific journals is presented in Figure 3.
Paying for real, open-access publications is a reasonable thing to do, but the money should go to reputable, not spurious journals. The extent to which thousands of authors have incurred strong negative impacts as the result of having been duped into publishing in spurious journals is sad, both for those authors and the scientific community at large. Fake web-sites of hijacked journals can be created by almost anyone who has even minimal knowledge of how to design a website by using an open-source Content Management Systems (CMSs). According to the Jalalian and Mahboobi (2014), cyber criminals are definitely familiar with author's behaviors, and they know that many of authors are in urgent need of publishing a couple of "ISI papers" (i.e. articles published in journals that are indexed by Thomson Reuters/Institute for Scientific Information-ISI) within a limited period of time. In the Republic of Serbia, a journal published by the Serbian Biological Society is currently under investigation by the Centre for Evaluation in Education and Science (CEON/CEES), which runs the Serbian National Citation Index in cooperation with the National Library of Serbia. The investigation follows a revelation by Scholarly Open Access blog that the journal, "Archives of Biological Sciences", accepted a scientific paper within the 24 hours with no peer re- Source: http://www.unige.ch/sphn/ view and demanded 1,785 Euros to publish it. Due to this affair, CEON/CEES have also started a bibliometric analysis to address the accusations, before deciding on the course of action (http://www.scilogs.com/ balkan_science_beat/serbian-journal-archives-of-biological-sciences-under-investigation-following-ac-cusation-of-predatory-practice/). Also, during 2014 in the Autonomous province of Kosovo and Metohija (Southern Serbia), University of Priština's Rector has been pressured to resign after it was revealed he published articles in predatory journals (according to Beall's list) in order to meet the requirements for promotion to a full professor. Three articles were published in volume 4, issue 3 (2013) of the "International Journal of Engineering and Management Sciences", a journal published by the Lucknow, India-based publisher Society for Science and Nature (http://scholarlyoa.com/2014/01/24/university-of-pristina-rectorunder-fire-for-publishing-in-predatory-journals/). In addition, an article co-authored by the above mentioned Rector was published in the scandal-plagued Romanian scientific journal "Metalurgia International". The target of a sting operation which was performed by the professors from the Faculty of Organizational Sciences-University of Belgrade (Serbia) during 2013 has led to the removal of the "Metalurgia International" impact factor (IF) and predatory journal disappearance from the internet (http:// scholarlyoa.com/2014/01/24/university-of-pristina- rector-under-fire-for-publishing-in-predatory-journals/). Scientific community in Serbia is somewhat unprotected to this negative trend and insufficiently informed by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development, KoBSON Portal and COBISS platform. These services provide very general information about predatory journals with highlights on the Jeffrey Beall's classification of predatory publishers and most likely predatory journals (http://kobson.nb.rs/kobson.82.html). There is an appeal to the researchers to check the International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) of the journal, not bearing in mind that some spurious journals have copied the original ISSN number to their site, making them hard to distinguish from the authentic journals. In the section of the KoBSON electronic journal database there should be a warning against some of the highly suspicious scientific journals which have been hijacked by the cyber criminals over the last several years in order to prevent possible frauds.

Guidelines for identifing the predatory scientific journals
In the past, a journal title that was unfamiliar to a researcher would be an automatic red-flag for journal quality. As the number of journals increases exponentially (Larsen, von Ins, 2010), scholars and academic researchers have turned to a wide variety of tools to help separate quality publications from the rest. Journal metrics like the impact factor (IF) (Garfield, 2006) and a journal's h-index have been used (and misused) extensively. In recent years, librarian Jeffery Beall has put together a list of the worst journals of all, so-called "predatory journals". Also, he assembled a list of the "predatory publishers" by applying the specially designated criteria. The list of questionable, scholarly openaccess journals is presented in Table 1 (see appendix) (http://scholarlyoa.com/individual-journals/). The list of potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers is available on: http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/.
Jeffrey Beall regularly updates this list. He sets forth criteria for categorizing predatory publications and lists publishers and independent journals that meet those criteria (http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/11/30/criteria-for-determining-predatory-open-access-publishers-2nd-edition/). According to "Nature" Beall's list and website are "widely read by librarians, researchers and open-access advocates, many of whom applaud his efforts to reveal shady publishing practices" (Butler, 2013). Beall has instituted a four person review body to which publishers can appeal (http://scholarlyoa.com/appeals) in order to be removed from the list in case they feel their inclusion is unjustified.
Some of the criticisms that are associated with predatory open access publishing also include: 1. Accepting articles quickly without peer review or quality control, including hoax and nonsensical papers (Gilbert, 2009;Basken, 2009

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. Some predatory open access publishers intentionally assigned the word "International" or "Global" in front of well-established and popular journals, for example: "International Journal of Applied Physics [IJAP]", whereas the "Journal of Applied Physics" is published by IEEE (Rahman, et al., 2014).

Conclusion and future preventive strategies
Fake publishers and impact factors (IF) indicate an urgent need to evaluate the methods that are currently used to assess academic research. Doing a thorough retrospective assessment of journals and publishers is definitely an urgent need in today's academic world. Also, if author is considering publishing a research work in a scientific journal that is characterized as "reputable journal" there are few crucial things to consider following the pre-submission process such as: • Have any of the colleagues from authors respective institution read, reviewed or published in that specific scientific journal? • Where is the journal indexed? Can it be found via databases which stands as usual tool to access, use or find specific scientific information? • Is it associated with a scholarly society familiar to the author? • Are there any reliable metrics associated with the journal (traditional or alternative)? • Who is the editor? Who is on the editorial board?
Are the members of the editorial board familiar to the author itself? Is there any available information about them? • Does the scientific journal come with the regular trappings of a serial publication (e.g. ISSN's, DOI's, etc)? (http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/2013/05/24/its-not-about-predators-its-about-journal-quality/).
The author has to make a distiction between so called "reputable journals" and "high-quality journals" (Jalalian, Mahboobi, 2014) bearing in mind that scientific work which he/she tends to publish can be endangered by applying the research to some questionable journals. Due to the fast acting of cyber criminals regarding the hijacking of the scientific journals, the authors are advised to act with extreme caution when submitting their research. They are also advised to be "up to date" with new information regarding this controversial topic by informing themselves through various websites and specialized scientific portals. It is highly recommended that the Beall's list of predatory publishers and journals should be consulted every time when an author plans to submit scientific work to some of the journals that are indexed by Thomson Re-uters/Institute for Scientific Information-ISI and covered by the Journal Citation Report. Also, academic society in the Republic of Serbia needs to be more informed about this important issue by the competent institutions and working groups within the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development in order to prevent possible frauds. All this efforts in fighting and suppressing this new form of cyber crime within academic community can be strongly supported by a well organized open academic discussions on various levels. Providing an open lecture series with media support can be a useful tool in this matter. The question regarding predatory open access publishing represents an important issue that has to be briskly discussed within academic scientific community on national, regional and global level as well.

Technics Technologies Education Management
This is a list of questionable, scholarly open-access journals. The recommendation is that scholars read the available reviews, assessments and descriptions on similar topics, and then decide for themselves whether they want to submit articles, serve as editors or on editorial boards.