Predatory journals

[Roderic D. M. Page]

Hi all,

I sent a message on this topic to the Wikicite telegram channel, but will send it here as well.

I've come across a case of a "predatory journal" where a journal that ceased publication ("The Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera" https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q21385487 ) has had its name and ISSN taken over by a journal that publishes unrelated work. The Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera was a taxonomic journal that ended in 2017 (killed off by its editor, see https://biostor.org/reference/244042 ). There is now a journal with the same name that publishes unrelated papers, e.g. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q108466621. At the moment there are only four articles linked to the journal (see http://alec-demo.herokuapp.com/Q21385487 ) but I plan to add a lot more.

There is a property for "predatory journal" https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q65770378 that seems hardly used but seems appropriate here. I'm tempted to create a second item for the predatory "The Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera" which will have the same ISSN, flag it as predatory using Q65770378 and link any articles published in that journal to that new item.

Any thoughts on this?  Given that predatory journals are not uncommon it seems odd that so few are flagged as such, perhaps they aren't in Wikidata, or perhaps people are reluctant to flag such journals given the potential difficulty in making that claim.

Regards,

Rod

[Arthur Smith]

I don't think Wikidata editors should be determining for themselves that a journal is "predatory", but if an outside source claims it then that could be cited as a reference for such a claim, that seems fine.

In this case do you have any other sources to confirm that this journal is not a continuation of the old one? It appears to be published by the same organization, or at least claims so - see the contact page at https://lepidopteraresearchfoundation.org/ - and they list many volumes of the journal on that website, though only the last two years seem to be available online as far as I could tell. It's possible that other involved people decided to continue it or bring it back despite that editorial?

   Arthur

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[Leena Shah]

Hi 

For finding good quality, peer reviewed Open Access journals, DOAJ is a good source. At the moment there's 17000 OA journals listed. We have a dedicated team in DOAJ to detect and keep predatory OA journals out of our listing. 

There is no "free" list of predatory journals. Cabell's is a subscription only. Bealls list was proven controversial and taken down in 2017. There is a twitter account https://twitter.com/fake_journals but we don't know who manages the Twitter a/c.

The journal mentioned in the email seems closed access, nothing published in 2021, no editorial board, review process and very little information about the publisher.  Would not trust it. I would suggest writing to the publisher/foundation if you really need to find out. 

rgds

Leena Shah

Managing Editor, DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)

https://doaj.org

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[Samuel Klein]

This goes beyond predatory, it's just fraud.  We need an entirely new tag for that.

It is highly unlikely that the paper mill using that website today is related to the Lepidoptera Foundation at the address on the masthead.

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[Samuel Klein]

This is what the real journal looked like.  https://web.archive.org/web/20170422133704/http://lepidopteraresearchfoundation.org/ 

The domain hijackers who stole the identity of the original foundation are likely breaking a variety of laws by committing identity + business fraud as well.

Rod, why would you want to include any of the recent fake articles in Wikidata?  If anything they should be removed from Crossref, and the ISSN should certainly be decommissioned and not associated with any new material since 2018.

[Roderic D. M. Page]

Thanks everyone for the responses.

My takeaway is that while the journal is fraudulent, making that claim would ideally require some citable evidence, which we don't have. 

Sam, I personally don't want to add fake articles, but two already exist in Wikidata. There is a conversation to be had with CrossRef, and it is likely to involve another project that I'm involved in (the Biodiversity Heritage Library is assigning DOIs to legacy journals and has digitised copies of the original journal https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/129988 ).

Meantime I feel that creating two items, one for the original (now defunct) journal, and one for this other journal would be a reasonable way forward, so that at least we can distinguish them, and have a place to link the two articles already in Wikidata for the more recent iteration of the journal.

Regards,

Rod

[Samuel Klein]

Two items sounds like the right next step.

I wrote ISSN US to ask about similarly separating the new fake-journal from the distinguished one whose name it stole.

I was also in touch with a previous editor who confirmed the hijacking + that they don't know what to do about it.  I'll ask them to publish some citable statement to that effect.    I hate frauds like this.   S

[Samuel Klein]

More generally, it looks like there have been at least a few hundred journal hijackings online, and that it continues to be a thriving practice.  
Here are 140 from Beall's list.  Only some of these generated DOIs for the fraudulent articles. 

We should have some sort of property for "hijacked by" w/ an associated URL and date range, so that people cleaning up other article lists can know whether to look more closely at articles from that journal title during those years.

SJ

[Samuel Klein]

On Wed, Jan 5, 2022 at 8:59 AM Roderic D. M. Page <r.p...@bio.gla.ac.uk> wrote:

My takeaway is that while the journal is fraudulent, making that claim would ideally require some citable evidence, which we don't have. 

Sam, I personally don't want to add fake articles, but two already exist in Wikidata. There is a conversation to be had with CrossRef, and it is likely to involve another project that I'm involved in (the Biodiversity Heritage Library is assigning DOIs to legacy journals and has digitised copies of the original journal https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/129988 ).

How's this other project coming?  Is there a related wikiproject for it? 

The hijacked journal in question is offline now; we should write out guidelines for what would ideally happen in cases like this.

 a. citable statement of fraud by an editor of the original journal (published where? archival + online is best)

 b. metadata repos like DOI to update (at least to correct the fraud)

A form of a. could look like a retraction notice -- "These N articles were published apparently under our name, but not by us; they are not about (topic) and there is no reason to think they went through (peer review). They should not be cited as peer reviewed research."   And a form of b. could be redirecting to such a notice.

 

Meantime I feel that creating two items, one for the original (now defunct) journal, and one for this other journal would be a reasonable way forward, so that at least we can distinguish them, and have a place to link the two articles already in Wikidata for the more recent iteration of the journal.

On reflection, I don't know that we want hijacked articles + journals to be remotely confusable with normal article/journal entities.  We could have subtypes of "hijacked journal" and "hijacked article".