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.

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