Hijacked Journals and Predatory Publishers: Is There a Need to Re-Think How to Assess the Quality of Academic Research?

During the last 2 years, there has been extensive discussion about "hijacked journals being imposed on the academic world by the huge increase in the number of bogus publishers and spurious websites". Hijackers make money by stealing the identities of legitimate journals and collecting the article processing charges on the papers that are submitted to journals. The cybercriminals have cheated thousands of professors and Ph.D. scholars mostly from developing countries and those who were in the urgent need of publishing their articles in journals that are covered by the Journal Citation Report (a Thomson Reuters' product). The fake journals targeted their victims using smart ideas both in web development step and victim selection. This paper introduces some simple methods that can be used easily to identify the fake publishers as a short to midterm solution and recommends establishing a movement for designing a new model for assessing the quality of academic research.