Samuel Westwood was building a fence gate from discarded pallet wood when the first email arrived. The psychologist from King’s College London had spent his weekend on this modest carpentry project, and apart from a few wonky shelves he’d built over the years, it represented the entirety of his engineering expertise. So, when a stranger wrote asking if he was really the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, Westwood assumed it was spam.
Then came another email. And another.
“I found out about a week ago that I am the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Engineering and Technology Management,” Westwood would later write on his blog in bewilderment. “This is not normally how you find out you are an EiC.”
But then again, this wasn’t a normal journal.
Westwood discovered a large-scale deception that targets researchers desperate for publications when career advancement depends on quantity over quality.
What Westwood had stumbled upon was a brazen academic fraud operating in plain sight. A website claiming to be the Journal of Engineering and Technology Management (with an impact factor of 4.8) was selling quick publications to researchers for 2000 INR or $100 USD, promising peer review and open access publication in just two days. They had stolen Westwood’s name to lend credibility to their operation, apparently choosing him at random from UK university directories.
The real journal, published by Elsevier since 1984 with a 3.7 impact factor, focuses on R&D management and the intersection of technology and business strategy. It’s indexed in Scopus, maintains rigorous peer review standards, and publishes carefully curated research that advances the field of technology management. The fake journal, operating from jet-m.com, will publish literally anything.
{{/usCountry}}The real journal, published by Elsevier since 1984 with a 3.7 impact factor, focuses on R&D management and the intersection of technology and business strategy. It’s indexed in Scopus, maintains rigorous peer review standards, and publishes carefully curated research that advances the field of technology management. The fake journal, operating from jet-m.com, will publish literally anything.
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Volume 76 alone contains over 60 papers, suggesting this operation has published thousands of fraudulent papers generating crores of rupees.
A visit to their most recent issue reveals the spectacular scope of this academic farce. Readers will find papers on any topic under the sun. In fact, the same paper on AI in recruitment appears twice in the same issue.
The sheer absurdity might be comical if the implications weren’t so serious. Each of these papers comes with what appears to be a DOI, a digital object identifier that in legitimate publishing provides a permanent link to scholarly work. The fake journal’s DOIs lead nowhere. They’re not registered with Crossref, the standard agency that assigns and verifies DOIs. But they look real enough on a CV.
This is academic CV laundering at its most transparent. Researchers with weak or irrelevant work pay to have it “published” in what appears to be a prestigious journal, then use that publication to pad their credentials.
The fee structure is telling: 2000 INR or $100 USD. The Indian rupee pricing reveals the target market, and author affiliations confirm it. The overwhelming majority are researchers at Indian institutions.
The fee is cynically calibrated. It is affordable enough for desperate researchers, yet when multiplied by sixty-plus papers per issue, it creates a lucrative revenue stream for scammers who barely lift a finger to format the submissions. The documents appear exactly as submitted, without even basic typesetting or layout- the absolute minimum effort for maximum profit.
They’re not even pretending to be publishers, they’re simply selling receipts.
The victims extend far beyond the legitimate journal whose reputation is being hijacked. Westwood heard from one researcher who wanted to submit their paper elsewhere after getting it accepted at the fake journal, only to find other journals wouldn’t review it because it was flagged as plagiarized content. Their research was trapped forever in a fraudulent repository, their academic career potentially derailed by one wrong submission.
Then there are honest researchers competing for positions and funding against colleagues who have padded their CVs with fake publications. Every fraudulent paper makes merit harder to measure and rewards deception over genuine scholarship. The entire academic ecosystem suffers when publication counts matter more than publication quality.
Yet the operation continues brazenly. They seem to understand that the academic system’s own weaknesses protect them: the pressure to publish is so intense, the number of journals so vast, and the verification systems so weak that they can operate almost with impunity.
One wonders about the authors themselves. Can someone submitting a paper on ancient Indian mathematics to an engineering management journal really believe they’re engaging in legitimate scholarship? When the same issue contains papers on everything from cosmic philosophy to thyroid disorders, doesn’t the fraud become obvious to all participants?
The fake journal’s editorial board lists names with no institutional affiliations, submissions run through Gmail addresses rather than official publisher emails, and they promise “blind peer review” while guaranteeing publication in two days, a timeline any academic knows is impossible for genuine review.
It’s not hard to identify this journal as a fraudulent one, and we can say with confidence that most of those who brazenly pay to post their unedited documents (”publish” is too strong a word) know exactly what they’re getting themselves into.
Perhaps that’s the most troubling aspect of this scandal: it suggests a level of complicity that goes beyond individual bad actors. Universities that accept such fraudulent publications for promotion decisions, funding bodies that count papers without reading them, and academic departments that prioritize quantity over quality all enable an ecosystem of deception.
As India builds its research capacity, these fraudulent shortcuts undermine genuine scientific progress. India has world-class institutions, but it also has people who are willing to post their work in places like this.
The solution requires academic institutions to institute checks of publications before counting them. Funding agencies need fraud detection protocols. And researchers must bear the consequences of abetting a fraudulent system.
The website jet-m.com remains active as of this writing. New papers appear, each author adding their name to a growing list of those who have chosen shortcuts over scholarship. The real Journal of Engineering and Technology Management continues its legitimate work, even as its reputation erodes with fraudulent use of its name.
And somewhere another unsuspecting academic is about to discover they’ve become the face of a journal they’ve never heard of, in a field they’ve never studied, enabling fraud they never chose to be a part of.
Anirban Mahapatra is a scientist and author, most recently of the popular science book, When The Drugs Don’t Work: The Hidden Pandemic That Could End Medicine. The views expressed are personal.