Premier Indian science journal warns against fakes

India's leading inter-disciplinary science journal, Current Science, has raised an alert over a predatory journal calling itself the publisher of Current Science.

The fake journal is snaring unsuspecting researchers into submitting their research articles promising to publish them, it said.

"We have learned that an entity that calls itself www.currentscience.org is operating from an IP address located in Turkey. It has copied content from the Current Science journal website and promotes itself as the publisher of Current Science," said an alert recently issued by Current Science.

The premier Indian journal is published every fortnight by the Current Science Association in collaboration with the Indian Academy of Sciences.

The alert also draws attention to another IP address located in Ukraine.

"Also, we found that www.currentscience.co.in is operating from an IP address located in Ukraine doing the same thing. This is a typical predatory journal behaviour and is a fraud."

The journal said that emails originating from currentsciencejournals@gmail.com are fraudulent. "These emails are from a fake website that could include a request to submit articles and promise to publish approximately two weeks after the submission."

"If you receive such an email, forward the message to currsci@ias.ac.in and delete the message. We are taking steps to blacklist this predatory entity."

India is among the biggest contributors of fake or pseudo journals.

A 2015 study in the journal BMC Medicine had pegged the country on top in the list of predatory publishers in the world with a contribution of 27.1 per cent.

In 2016, a study published in Current Science had pointed out the share of national institutes in the menace.

About 11 per cent of papers in such bogus journals are ascribed to researchers from national institutes of India while private/government colleges contribute to about 51 per cent of predatory publications, followed by private universities, state universities, for research articles published from September 2015 to mid-February 2016.

--IANS

sgh/him/vt