In recent years, digital scammers are deceiving young or less experienced researchers with fake journals. In scientific writing, they are sometimes named hijacked journals or clone websites (briefly, clones) that are a very serious problem in science. Although there is no unique opinion about how to treat the published contents in these questionable platforms, the science community mostly prefers to consider all published contents as fake science with no credit for their contributors. On the other hand, the community has accepted that the contributors have been victimized so that no punishment is required, the only loss is their scientific work that has been wasted, in addition to their time, money and energy. The current solution of scientometric experts to help potential victims of such platforms is to develop more guidelines (such as journal articles, news and posts, databases, and presentations) to make the researchers aware of the entity of the clones. In this regard, Holly Else, a reporter at Nature, has focused her report on a new tool (a periodically updated database) and its importance to avoid any prospective scam. She has also invited four scientists to express their ideas about the topic. 

This report has been published as a 2022 news item in Nature and contains some insights and thoughts about the challenges of classical and modern clones (indexed clones) detailing their current trends and future view, part of the article is disseminating my viewpoint. 

Further reading at Nature: main article