The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now lists 400+ journals with cloned websites that trick researchers into submitting to fake versions of real journals

As of late 2025, the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker maintained by researcher Anna Abalkina lists over 400 journals that have been hijacked -- meaning scammers created fraudulent websites that clone the appearance, title, ISSN, and metadata of legitimate journals. In late 2024, a new wave of hijacking targeted journals from Elsevier, Springer Nature, and other major publishers with remarkable fidelity. A company called 'Springer Global Publication' was linked to many of these scams. Papers submitted to hijacked journals are published on the fake site, often using recycled content, and assigned fake DOIs (starting with '16' or '20' instead of the legitimate '10' prefix). The victims are researchers who believe they have published in a legitimate, indexed journal. They pay APCs (often $500-2,000), list the publication on their CV, and cite it in grant applications -- only to discover months or years later that their paper appeared on a fraudulent website that has no connection to the real journal. For researchers in countries where publication counts directly determine salary, promotion, and funding, a hijacked journal publication can mean the difference between career advancement and stagnation. The paper is not indexed, not discoverable, and not citable. The money is gone. And the researcher may face institutional suspicion of having knowingly published in a fraudulent venue, even though they were the victim of a sophisticated scam. Hijacked journals persist because the domain name system and web infrastructure make it trivially easy to create convincing clones. When a legitimate journal lets its domain registration lapse, scammers buy it. When a journal uses a generic web template, scammers copy it. There is no centralized registry that authoritatively maps journal titles and ISSNs to verified URLs. ISSN.org, Crossref, and publisher websites each maintain separate records that are not cross-referenced in real-time. Researchers have no single source of truth to verify whether the submission portal they are looking at is the real one. And the scammers operate across jurisdictions where enforcement is impractical.