13 May 2025
Thomas Swindells, Senior Research Integrity Manager at Emerald Publishing
Like many academic publishers, Emerald has been targeted by fraudulent operations that attempt to undermine legitimate research and manipulate the scholarly publishing process for authors. While these have mostly been somewhat amateurish attempts to disrupt traffic to our submission portals, there is a growing sense of things ratcheting up across the sector.
If in doubt that cybercrime is starting to view publishing seriously, you only need look at the recent striking facsimiles of Elsevier and Springer journals that are dangerous and convincing to the unsuspecting in their accuracy and apparent authenticity. We shouldn’t be surprised that an industry valued in the billions and with an exponentially growing userbase has begun to encourage fraud on a more organised scale: where there is demand to publish, there is now also an increasingly sophisticated market of phishing and scams.
Hook, line, and sinker
For Emerald, phishing attacks have included impersonating Emerald staff and representatives via email, social media, and other communications channels; cloning a closed book series using the original ISSN, cover image, and Emerald’s former address on mock acceptance letters complete with the deceased editor’s name; and the creation of a pastiche of Emerald’s website and branding, although a side-by-side comparison makes the forgeries very easy to spot.
These initiatives offer the author guaranteed acceptance or fast-tracked publication to an Emerald journal via a third-party representative, in exchange for a substantial sum of money paid by WhatsApp, Telegram, or the latest under the radar communications. The scams are taking full advantage of the publish-or-perish mentality and those willing to subvert the publication process, either driven by the pressures imposed by their field or institution, or the desire to game the system and boost their Altmetric score, citations, and publication records. It must be stated that there is no fast-tracking within an ethically driven system with appropriate checks, editorial scrutiny, and rigorous peer review. As with most scams, these phishing attempts are offering something that does not exist – success without the work.
On the other hand, those sites cloned using bot-scraping technology – like the aforementioned hijacked Elsevier and Springer sites, and to a lesser extent those predatory sites that have imitated Emerald – are so similar to the real page that they lure in the internet-aware and the unsuspecting alike, including trustworthy authors that are not seeking to fast-track their work or manipulate its handling and review. The more sophisticated the scam sites, the higher their risk to our industry: authors lose money as well as their original content; the public suffers from a delay of time-sensitive important research and the misuse of vital funding; and reputable publishers are tarnished by proxy because we are caught in the middle between the villains and the victims.
Lures and losses
How do we identify these sites and scams? Usually, a scammed author reaches out to one of our editors or production team members to enquire when their article will be published. They have been informed that their publication was successfully processed by the handling company and received a bogus letter of acceptance following payment, but then the “Emerald contact” or handling company stops responding. On average we receive one of these complaints a week, which is a notable increase from previous years.
We do our best to corroborate our suspicions of scam activity by checking the journal in question for names and email addresses used by either the author or the scammer, but these invariably turn up blank. In many cases these scams occur solely through WhatsApp or Telegram, but if a fraudulent website has been used, the artwork is a poor imitation of the real thing, the wording overtly broken, and the overall impression unconvincing at best. Yet with improved cloning technology, the differences between the real site and the imitator are reduced, and the anomaly is often just a letter apart in the URL. Why are authors falling for it? It seems the combination of desperation and the association of academia with trust has led to a lapse in people’s internet safety and savviness.
Tackling the problem
What are we as a publisher doing to combat this, given the variety of phishing attacks? We recognise that these cloned sites gain traction because of accessibility and visibility: if the top search result for Emerald journals is not an Emerald site but a fake one, then it is understandable that people are being led astray. To combat this, we have improved our search engine optimisation so that the official Emerald website is the first result returned for online searches, thereby beating the fraudsters to the mark. This approach responds to those academics who are unconsciously directed to predatory sites.
We have paired this with a coordinated social media counter-strategy, working with companies such as Meta to remove any fraudulent accounts. Progress has been slow: the initial efforts to make a dent in the predatory sites’ social media pages were laborious and protracted, with the long-awaited removal of one being rewarded by its reappearance mere days later. However, the subsequent account was removed within 24 hours. This success points to the need to establish a clear process that can be put into action instantly once a fraudulent page is detected, preventing future scams rather than reacting after the fact.
Tackling the websites of these organisations has proved to be more difficult, as the domain and filing information indicate that they are registered all over the world: our latest clone was linked to Iceland while the banking details provided to patrons were based in Kazakhstan. Attempting to shut these cloned pages down has been time-consuming and often futile, but we have now created a step-by-step process whereby once a predatory site is reported to us, we flag it online and alert others. This incident-response process entails our own investigation of the website and the collection of any evidence of our brand or content being cloned to scam people. We then report the website as fraudulent to browsers and search engines, email providers, the host or registrar, and to national cybersecurity authorities where appropriate. As with publishing in general and the work of research integrity in particular, it is about the establishment of trust markers, the flagging of our own content as trusted and that of the phishing sites as untrustworthy.
Casting a look to the future
Emerald’s approach to resolve this is a combination of technology and awareness-raising. We are now alerting our authors to the perils of phishing at key stages in our publication workflow – within our author guidelines and publishing ethics policies, at the point of submission and copyright transfer, and as part of our customer support. We emphasise that, aside from an Article Processing Charge for open access handled by our Emerald Submit platform after acceptance, we will never ask authors to contribute financially towards their article’s review, processing, or publication: we will never publish work in exchange for money.
We also emphasise that the only way to submit to our journals is through that title’s ScholarOne submission portal as accessed via the Emerald website, and not via a link in an email provided by any third-party agent, company, or journal representative. This signposting strives to make our processes more transparent and to alert authors as to when something is not what it seems.
In addition to working to take down predatory phishing websites, we hope that by highlighting the risks of scams to current and prospective researchers and reinforcing what the publication process does and does not entail, we will help to build a long-term solution to the problem from the ground up.
We also encourage libraries to help educate authors about phishing risks and verify the authenticity of submission portals and communications. Together, we can create a more informed and vigilant scholarly community.