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An academic journal's editorial team was unable to contact scammers who'd convinced them to pursue a special issue because fake email accounts the scammers used to impersonate well-respected scientists in the field had expired, according to an account published Monday in Chemistry World.
The Journal of Nanoparticle Research revealed last month that it was the victim of an attack by an “organized rogue editor network.” As a result, the journal accepted 19 articles that did not meet the publication’s quality standards and published several of them online.
In September 2019, the journal received a pitch for a special issue on the “Role of Nanotechnology and Internet of Things in Healthcare.” The proposal was well written and came with a list of potential contributors, the journal wrote in an article about the attack. The journal checked the headers of the emails it received, and they appeared to be generated by university accounts.
Months after accepting the proposal, the journal received a large number of submissions for the issue. Upon further inspection, the journal learned many of the submissions were of low quality or did not fit with the topic of the issue. At that point, 19 of 80 submissions had already been accepted or published.
Through an internal investigation, the journal learned the academics who had supposedly proposed the special issue had nothing to do with it. In August 2019, the rogue group bought domain names similar to those of the universities they impersonated. In one email, "univ" was used instead of "uni" and in another, "-ac.uk" was used in place of ".ac.uk."
“Have we been careless? Probably,” the journal wrote, “but who would have thought scientists would go to that extent, i.e., to organize a whole rogue network and propose a sound and interesting special issue in a scientific journal, just to get a few articles published?”
The journal has rejected all remaining submissions that can be clearly linked to the rogue network. Some articles that had been accepted will not be published, and published papers that fit the scope of the issue were undergoing post-publication peer review.
"All of the evidence points to an organized network that tries -- in this case successfully -- to infiltrate scientific journals with the objective of easily publishing manuscripts from pseudo-scientists or less productive researchers who want to appear in respectable journals," the journal wrote.
The journal has implemented more strict processes to prevent future hacks, it said.
When the journal's editorial team looked into the scam, it found the fake email accounts were expired, Nicola Pinna, the journal’s executive editor, recently told Chemistry World.
"There was no way we could even try to contact them back via these domain names -- they don’t exist anymore," Pinna told Chemistry World.
