Spawns of a journal are appearing under other domain names.
This is the actual journal:
https://lans-tts.uantwerpen.be/index.php/LANS-TTS/index
We have found two predatory journals (no DOI and no PDF downloads)
1: Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies (almost exact)
2: https://www.hivt.be/linguistica (This one is using the name and has little to do with the actualjournal)
The first one is bewildering. Is this a trend? are there ways to prevent this? How is it possible to have the database of articles and authors available on their site?
Hi @jamiefowlie,
I ran this by our development team, and here’s what they had to say:
“I can see subtle differences between the two “identical” sites: publication dates, some UTF8 problems. It suggests to me that this wasn’t cloned at e.g. the database level. A look at the OAI feeds of the two shows a lot of differences. I’m pretty sure this was cloned manually.”
I haven’t seen this happen with OJS to suggest it is a trend. It’s possible that someone installed OJS on their own hosting/web servers and then duplicated content on this site. But, it doesn’t look like it was done through an automated/cloning process. This could happen with any website if the bad actor took the time to duplicate public facing content and used open source software to replicate the look and feel of the site.
I’m sorry this has happened to you. I don’t have any explicit advice on what actions to take or how to prevent this, but others may have experienced this may wish to weigh in with their thoughts and suggestions.
Best regards,
Roger
PKP Team