Invasion of the ‘journal snatchers’: the firms that buy science publications and turn them rogue

Research-integrity analysts are warning that ‘journal snatchers’ — companies that acquire scholarly journals from reputable publishers — are turning legitimate titles into predatory, low-quality publications with questionable practices.

In an analysis published on the preprint repository Zenodo in January¹, researchers identified three dozen journals that have been caught in this predicament after being bought by what they describe as a network of recently established international companies with no track record in the publishing industry. The scholarly database Scopus has removed the titles from its index after an investigation.

“We found at least 36 journals but we think that there may be more,” says study co-author Alberto Martín-Martín, an information scientist at the University of Granada in Spain. Nature was able to reach one of the companies named in the study, Oxbridge Publishing House, which disputes the allegations.

Recent takeover

The titles were previously indexed by databases such as Scopus and Web of Science, and were owned by various institutions, including the Dutch publishing giant Elsevier; the academic publisher Palgrave Macmillan, based in London; Indiana University Northwest, in Gary, Indiana; and the University of São Paulo, in Brazil. They range in discipline from linguistics, psychology and criminology to biology and medicine. (Palgrave Macmillan is owned by Springer Nature, which also publishes Nature. Nature’s news team is independent of its publisher.)

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Martín-Martín’s study describes how, in the past few years, these journals were acquired by various companies, including Oxbridge Publishing House — a firm registered in the United Kingdom in September 2022 — another UK-based firm called Open Access Text, JCF Corp in Singapore and Intellectual Edge Consultancy in Malaysia.

According to e-mails evaluated by Martín-Martín and his co-author, Emilio Delgado López-Cózar, also an information scientist at Granada, publishers are being offered hundreds of thousands of euros in exchange for each journal. “For small journals, this is a very attractive offer,” Martín-Martín says.

After acquisition, the analysis found, a common trend appears across the publications: the journals introduce or raise article-processing charges — fees some open-access journals impose for publishing papers — and churn out more studies. Many of these papers are outside the scope of topics covered by the journal before acquisition.

These practices are typically associated with predatory publishing, where questionable publishers cut corners to generate low-quality or fraudulent research papers in exchange for high publication fees.

Ownership question

Most of the companies named in the analysis did not respond to Nature’s requests for comment. David Radhor, relationship manager at Oxbridge Publishing House, says the company is “not a publisher” and does not directly own all of the titles in Martín-Martín’s preprint. (The study claims that Oxbridge has directors in common with some of the other companies, and suggests that it is part of a network of linked firms that are actively acquiring journals.)

Radhor adds that for the journals Oxbridge Publishing House does own, the company “has not been involved in their editorial decision-making” and does not have oversight of the number of papers published, the article-processing charges or the authors who submit manuscripts. Those decisions are made independently by each journal’s editorial board, he says. “Our role is primarily operational, focusing on production and formatting, publishing and distribution, sales and revenue management, marketing and promotion, legal and compliance, and technology and infrastructure.”

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Nature also attempted to contact all 36 journals listed in the study. Amjid Iqbal, managing editor of the American Journal of Health Behavior (AJHB) in Los Angeles, California, says his journal increased their publication fees (from US$1,595 to £2,000 according to the study) because of inflation and because its vendors increased their charges. He adds that all editorial decisions are made by the journal’s editorial board. The study claims that payments to AJHB from authors based in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East are handled by Oxbridge Publishing House, but Iqbal says that the journal has no relationship with the company.

Representatives from the International Journal of Medicine and Science of Physical Activity and Sport and ArtsEduca declined to answer questions about their ownership and editorial oversight. The remaining journals did not respond to requests for comment.

In two other cases, researchers contacted by Nature said they had been falsely listed as editors on journal websites.

“One of the problems of these companies is that when they buy journals, they are not very open about this, and in many cases, the journals don’t give any information about this new owner,” Martín-Martín says. “They don’t even display the name of the new owner on the journal website.”

Titles delisted

The ownership changes at the journals have led Scopus to review the inclusion of these titles in its database. A spokesperson for Elsevier, which runs Scopus, says that after a “detailed investigation”, Scopus decided to stop indexing all 36 titles in the study.

“As there has been significant change (different ownership), there is no guarantee that review quality is at the same level as the original journals,” the spokesperson says. “Journals under new ownership are considered ‘new’ and do not automatically inherit the Scopus indexing status of the original journal.”

Web of Science has also delisted the 17 journals that had been included on its indices, according to a spokesperson for the scholarly analytics firm Clarivate in London, which runs the database.

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Martín-Martín says it’s important that indexing databases are delisting the journals in question, because he feels that the prestige of being listed is an incentive for buying journals — “the whole reason why these companies are buying the journals in the first place”.

New Zealand-based psychologist and research-integrity sleuth David Bimler — who posts in online scientific forums using the pseudonym Smut Clyde — says the new analysis is “very impressive” and that it backs up previous reports of journal snatching involving other predatory publishers.

Acquiring legitimate journals will be a viable business model only if the affected journals remain indexed by databases, says Anna Abalkina, a sociologist at the Free University of Berlin, who tracks ‘hijacked journals’ — websites that mimic authentic publications to trick authors into paying publication charges.

She says the practice results from the pressure academics face to publish as many papers as possible to advance their careers. “Dishonest publishers are the consequence of the problem,” she says, “not the cause.”