A hijacked journal is a legitimate academic journal for which a bogus website has been created by a malicious third party for the purpose of fraudulently offering academics the opportunity to rapidly publish their research online for a fee.
Background
In 2012, cyber criminals began hijacking print-only journals by registering a domain name and creating a fake website under the title of the hijacked journals.
The first journal to be hijacked was the Swiss journal Archives des Sciences. In 2012 and 2013, more than 20 academic journals were hijacked. In some cases, forgers find their victim in conference proceedings, extracting authors' emails from papers and sending them fake calls for papers.
There have also been instances of hijacking journals by taking over their existing domain names after the journal publisher neglected to pay the domain name registration fees on time.