Hijacked journals are a form of cybercrime in which a malicious third party creates a cloned website to impersonate a legitimate publication. The forgery replicates the original journal’s important details, from its title to its archive and international standard serial number, a code that identifies the publication. The purpose of a hijacking is to generate money quickly by charging illegitimate article-processing fees to unsuspecting researchers. Although the hijackers often publish papers that have been submitted to the fraudulent site, these works are not peer-reviewed nor considered legitimate.
Criminals mad that someone else stole their grift.
All they have to do is convince some of the scientists to peer review each other’s work for free and theres no longer any significant difference between their scam and the OG journal scam.
Maybe if the real journals didn’t charge researchers an arm and a leg to have their paper published behind an equally absurd paywall to be able to read (often heavily publicly funded) research they wouldn’t be so ripe for abuse.
