In the first part of their article “The ‘hijacking’ of the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems: Implications for the information systems community”, Müller and Sæbø explain how they discovered that Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems (SJIS) had been hijacked.
Sune D Müller, professor of informatics at the University of Oslo in Norway and editor of the SJIS, learned of the hoax in early February 2023 via an email from a scholar. She was responding to an email from Müller saying a paper she had submitted had been rejected, which surprised her because she had already been informed that the paper had been accepted and because she had paid the US$250 ‘article publishing charge’.
However, SJIS does not charge for publishing and, as soon became apparent, the website that she had submitted the paper to and which instructed her to pay the publishing charge was a fake SJIS. Müller’s investigation of the fake website revealed it contained the entire SJIS archive.
The scholar provided Müller with a screenshot of the Scopus page with “the link to the fraudulent website”, which led him to contact Scopus’ customer support. A support officer told him that the link would be removed sometime in May. Müller told Scopus that waiting for two months “would be tantamount to contributing to the continuation of the scam”.
Neither Gmail, nor PayPal (through which the unsuspecting scholar paid the fake journal) responded to Müller’s complaints. Even with the help of the executive director of the AIS journals, Müller was unable to get Google and Bing to remove the fake journal from their searches. When Müller and Sæbø wrote their article, the bogus journal “appear[ed] as the fourth result on Bing and the third on Google when searching for SJIS”.
