Hijacked journals - threats and challenges to countries' scientific ranking

Hijacked journals are journals that are launched by fraudulent cyber entities for financial gain. They fraudulently use the names and ISSNs of reputable journals and cheat researchers. They publish papers by receiving publication charges similar to those of open access journals, but they are not authentic. Some researchers have written papers explaining this type of fraud, but it has not had the desired impact, because the number of victims of hijacked journals is increasing day by day. In this short paper, we discuss the impact of hijacked journals on the scientific progress of countries and try to show that hijacked journals pose important challenges to the academic world and scientific communication. We do so by showing the damages countries can incur when their researchers publish their work in these fraudulent journals, one of which is likely to be the downgrading of these countries' rankings by the leading organisations that publish academic rankings. Scimago Journal and Country Rank (SJR).