The invitation is for a journal you have actually heard of. You run it against the predatory-journal checklist you were taught: it has an ISSN, it appears in an index you recognise, it has years of archives and a plausible board.
Everything passes because it was all copied from a journal that genuinely passes. What you are looking at may not be that journal. Hijacked and cloned sites take a real title's identity — sometimes one that let its domain lapse — and collect submissions and fees under it.
So the checklist is the wrong instrument: the entity is not low quality, it is a different entity in a real one's clothes. The tests that work are ownership tests.
Why a quality checklist cannot catch a clone
Quality screening asks whether a journal describes its peer review, publishes a board and states its charges — the questions our guide to identifying a predatory journal covers. A clone answers them all correctly, because it copied the answers from a journal that did.
Identity needs different evidence. Anything printed on a page can be copied; a record held elsewhere, under someone else's control, is much harder to change, because it means persuading a third party rather than editing your own site. Harder is not impossible, which is why the tests below are read together rather than one at a time. They establish identity, not quality.
Start from the register, not from the email
Never navigate to a journal from a link you were sent: type the register's address yourself, find the journal there, and go to the site from there. A clone controls its own page; it does not control the ISSN record, an index's database or the DOI resolver, and changing any of those means convincing the body that keeps it.
The five-test identity check, in about ten minutes
| Test | Where you go — type the address yourself | What you compare | What a clone typically looks like | What an innocent mismatch looks like |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. The ISSN record | portal.issn.org, searched by ISSN or exact title | Title, publisher and URL, against the site in front of you | Title and ISSN match exactly; the publisher name or registered URL is somebody else | The journal changed publisher or domain and the record has not caught up; or an older record holds no URL |
| 2. The index's own record | The index the site claims — for example DOAJ — opened directly, not via the badge | The homepage link the index itself holds | It opens a different site from the one that invited you; or the title is not listed | A stale homepage link, or the title under a former name |
| 3. DOI resolution, backwards | doi.org, then the member record at Crossref | A recent article's DOI: the domain it resolves to, and the prefix's owner | It resolves to a different publisher's site; or the displayed DOIs do not resolve at all | Older articles keep a previous publisher's prefix after a transfer; or the content sits on a third-party platform, so the DOI lands on the host's domain, not the journal's |
| 4. Domain age | Any domain registration lookup | The registration date against the span of back issues displayed, and whether the real publisher's own site lists this domain | A domain registered months ago beneath twenty years of archives | The publisher moved domain, migrated the archive, and the old domain redirects |
| 5. The payment instruction | The invoice, and the charges page reached from the register | The payee name, the payment channel, and when money is requested | A personal account name; a payee unrelated to the publisher's legal identity; payment demanded before or apart from formal acceptance; a channel that changes after acceptance | The publisher's legal trading name differs from the journal's brand name — confirmable in writing |
Test one: read the publisher and URL fields on the ISSN record
An ISSN printed on a homepage proves nothing: it is eight characters anyone can type. What matters is the record behind it. Read that record for what it holds and does not hold: the public view shows basic data, the publisher field on many records names the earliest publisher, not the current one, and older or print-only records may carry no URL at all. A blank field is not a red flag. A clone typically reproduces the title while the publisher or the URL on the record belongs to somebody else.
Test two: follow the homepage link the index itself holds
Treat an indexing badge as a picture until you have found the title in the index's own database. Where the register holds a homepage link, follow it. If it opens a different site from the one that invited you, stop there and take it up with the journal through the register's own contact route.
Test three: resolve a DOI from the site's own recent articles
Take a DOI from a recent article, type doi.org yourself, and see which site opens. Resolving to a different publisher's domain needs an explanation. A DOI is a permanent pointer registered by the publisher that owns its prefix, and that owner is named in the Crossref member record.
If a DOI returns a not-found page it was probably never registered — check a second one before concluding, since a very recent deposit can take a few hours to go live and a mistyped character fails the same way.
Test four: registration date against an archive claiming twenty years
The usable signal is age: a domain registered months ago cannot have hosted a decade of issues. Compare its registration date with the oldest volume displayed, then check whether the real publisher's own site lists this domain.
A common overreach is ownership. Registrant details are frequently redacted for ordinary privacy reasons, and hosting country tells you where a server sits, not who a publisher is. A redacted record is evidence of nothing.
Test five: the payment instruction, where a clone must reveal itself
A clone must get money into an account it controls, which cannot be the real publisher's. Row five of the table lists the stop signals. At Directive Publications submission is free, and the charge falls due only if a manuscript is formally accepted after peer review.
A failing test is a question, not a verdict
Journals are transferred, rebranded and moved to new domains for ordinary reasons, and each of those breaks test one or test four for a while.
So read the pattern, not a single row. One mismatch with an administrative explanation is weak evidence; several failing the same way — the register points elsewhere, the DOIs resolve elsewhere, the domain is new — is a different picture. When something does not line up, ask through the register's own contact route, not an address on the site you are questioning. Publishing an accusation is not your job.
You have already submitted, or already paid
- Stop. No further correspondence, no revised files, no further payment.
- Contact your bank or card provider now if money has left; a transfer can sometimes be recalled.
- Write to the real journal through the ISSN or index record's contact details; only it can warn its own authors.
- Report it to the index listing the real title and to that country's ISSN centre.
- Keep everything — emails with full headers, invoices, payment references, screenshots of the site today.
- Tell your institution. If you were targeted, colleagues on the same lists may have been too.
A paper sent to a clone has not been published, whatever confirmation you received, so it can ordinarily be submitted elsewhere. If the clone has posted your full text, that differs: it is public under someone else's imprint, and you should disclose it to the next editor.
Confirming a Directive Publications title rather than a copy of one
We are not printing a list of our domains here: it would be wrong the moment a title moves, and a stale list is what a clone benefits from. Run the same method on us: read the ISSN record's publisher and URL fields, then resolve a DOI through doi.org. Every article we publish carries a registered DOI under prefix 10.52338, whose owner is visible in the Crossref member record. If a site presents itself as one of our journals and a recent article's DOI does not resolve under that prefix, treat that as a reason to write to our editorial office before you submit anything or pay anything.
Two caveats. We publish no clone-monitoring capability and claim none, so the registers are your evidence, not our assurance. These are identity checks, not quality claims: we set out separately where we are indexed and where we are not, and what the common metrics really mean.
Our submission route and editorial address are on the Submit page, with fees and waivers on Publication Charges and Fee Waivers & Discounts. If you are still choosing where to send the work, see choosing the right journal.