Sune Dueholm Müller is an associate professor at the University of Oslo and is currently serving as editor-in-chief of the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems. He tells his story:
" At the beginning of February 2023, I discovered that the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems (SJIS) had been hijacked. As editor-in-chief of the publication, I had been contacted by an author confused by receiving both an acceptance letter and a desk rejection for her manuscript. I had rejected the paper because it did not align with our editorial policy. Upon investigation, the acceptance letter turned out to have been issued by cybercriminals attempting to charge her for publication in what she thought was SJIS but was in fact a fraudulent website posing as the journal.
Her inquiry triggered a thorough investigation on my part. Over the subsequent weeks, I found that several authors had been scammed by the same criminals and that the scams followed the same pattern.
The source of the problems in all cases was Scopus, which linked to the fraudulent website (http://sjisscandinavian-iris.com/index.php/sjis) instead of the real one (https://aisel.aisnet.org/sjis/). Searching for indexed journals, victims were led straight to the fraudsters.
Although it appears the cybercriminals could easily infiltrate Scopus and search engines, removing the link to the fraudulent website has been much more challenging. Scopus took more than two months to delete the link, and it still appears in online searches despite my having reported it to the tech companies as a phishing scam on multiple occasions.
The authors I talked to said they had been deceived into paying the scammers up to $375 for a worthless publication.
Presently, no effective legal means exist for dealing with journal hijacking. I, for one, am open to unorthodox methods to shut down these operations, including hacking and disclosing the identities of the criminals. Until effective solutions to this growing problem emerge, education and awareness are vital. We are all potential victims of this scam."
Journal hijacking is a growing problem and a threat to the entire scientific community. Hijacked journals are scam websites that impersonate legitimate journals and attempt to take over their brand. A list including hundreds of these fake sites can be found at the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker.
