Predatory and Cloned Journals: Characteristics of "Predator" and "Cloned" Journals

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Predatory Journals:

Scientific journals that misrepresent and allow articles to be published without peer review and quality control. On the surface, they look reliable, but in practice they advertise without filtering procedures, for a fee. Publications in "predatory" journals are not considered academically reliable.

 :Cloned Journals

Journals imitating the names, trademark and ISSN numbers of legitimate journals. In contrast to "predatory" journals, they are a mirror image of well-known journals and thus their strength is to contact researchers and publish academic research with significant content. In addition, researchers may be tempted and even pay for open access publication out of confidence that their work is going to be published in a recognized journal.

Predatory Journals are characterized with:

• The peer review process is suspiciously fast

• Missing/misleading information about treatment fees

• Fabricated and unrecognized indexes and metrics

• Sending spam messages for submitting articles or for peer-reviewing articles on topics that don't relate to the researcher's field of study.

• Problematic design of the website, often accompanied by spelling errors and low-quality images.

• Names of editors are fake or untraceable.

• The journals usually cover many unrelated research topics.

• The name of the journal is similar to well-known journals

• The submission of articles is done via email and not via a secure website

• There is no information about the preservation of the digital content

• The journal does not have an ISSN or DOI for the article

Cloned Journals are characterized with:

• Attempt to clone the appearance of the website of the original journal

• Fake/misleading bibliometric indices will be used to entice researchers to publish in them

•   Articles will be published in less than 24 hours and sometimes within an hour after receiving payment

• The payment for advertising is usually by unsecured or unaccepted methods in the field (for example: money transfer via channels such as Western Union, PayUMoney, etc.)

• There is no reliable contact information on the journal's website. There is no detail on their editorial team

• International names of journals are cut, copied and pasted without their consent as well as their official email IDs

• Use of publisher trademarks such as: Elsevier, Clarivate, CrossRef, Emerald, etc