Cloned or Hijacked Journals: A Form of Academic Cybercrime

While entire academic world was busy on the debate of predatory or low-quality journals and publications, a severe academic form of cybercrime has emerged as ‘Hijacked Journals/Cloned Journals, which is more severe than the predatory one. Many such cloned journals are identified but yet many might have remained. Cloned journals posed a challenge not only towards a scientific publication but also towards publication industry and diluted the science. This case study is carried out to investigate the fraudulent behavior and features of cloned and hijacked journals. A journal ‘Adalya’ was selected from the list of cloned journals available on the website of UGC. An observational study has been carried out of home page of the original ‘Adalya’ and its cloned variant ‘Adalya Journal’. It was observed that cloned journals could be identified easily if a researcher is aware. Such cloned websites seem catchier but with unclear information, publishes content beyond their scope or multidisciplinary in nature, provides no clear physical address and location of publication, attracts the author with a promise to publish their article in couple of hours, issues publication certificate, provides fake digital object Identifiers (DOIs), websites not rich and have no clear information. The easiest way to get rid from such fraudulent cloned journals is that to verify the records of journal on ISSN Portal, SCOPUS and Clarivate Master Journal List As on country has full control over Internet of Things, its better for authors to save themselves from such cloned journals by keeping them updated about it.