title: Current and potential cyber attacks on medical journals; guidelines for improving security.
abstract: At the moment, scholarly publishing is faced with much academic misconduct and threats such as predatory journals, hijacked journals, phishing, and other scams. In response, we have been discussing this misconduct and trying to increase the awareness of researchers, but it seems that there is a lack of research that presents guidelines for editors to help them protect themselves against these threats. It seems that information security is missing in some parts of scholarly publishing that particularly involves medical journals. In this paper, we explain different types of cyber-attacks that especially threaten editors and academic journals. We then explain the details involved in each type of attack. Finally, we present general guidelines for detection and prevention of the attacks. In some cases, we use small experiments to show that our claim is true. Finally, we conclude the paper with a prioritization of these attacks.
authors.affiliation: Department of Management, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran. Electronic address: Mehdidadkhah@mail.um.ac.ir.
authors.forename: Mehdi
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Dadkhah
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Engineering, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran. Electronic address: hosseini@um.ac.ir.
authors.forename: Seyed Amin Hosseini
authors.initials: SAH
authors.lastname: Seno
authors.affiliation: Progressive Science Institute, Box 5335, Berkeley, CA 94705, USA.
authors.forename: Glenn
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Borchardt
mesh_terms: D016494:Computer Security / Q000592:standards*; D017408:Guidelines as Topic; D010506:Periodicals as Topic / Q000592:standards*
keywords: Academic journals; Hijacked journals; Information security; Journals' websites; Predatory journals