On Apr. 17, 2025, research-integrity analysts are warning that ‘journal snatchers’ — companies that acquire scholarly journals from reputable publishers — are turning legitimate titles into predatory, low-quality publications with questionable practices.

In an analysis published on the preprint repository Zenodo in January, researchers identified three dozen journals that have been caught in this predicament after being bought by what they describe as a network of recently established international companies with no track record in the publishing industry. The scholarly database Scopus has removed the titles from its index after an investigation.

“We found at least 36 journals but we think that there may be more,” says study co-author Alberto Martín-Martín, an information scientist at the University of Granada in Spain. Nature was able to reach one of the companies named in the study, Oxbridge Publishing House, which disputes the allegations.

The titles were previously indexed by databases such as Scopus and Web of Science, and were owned by various institutions, including the Dutch publishing giant Elsevier; the academic publisher Palgrave Macmillan, based in London; Indiana University Northwest, in Gary, Indiana; and the University of São Paulo, in Brazil. They range in discipline from linguistics, psychology and criminology to biology and medicine. (Palgrave Macmillan is owned by Springer Nature, which also publishes Nature. Nature’s news team is independent of its publisher.)

After acquisition, the analysis found, a common trend appears across the publications: the journals introduce or raise article-processing charges — fees some open-access journals impose for publishing papers — and churn out more studies. Many of these papers are outside the scope of topics covered by the journal before acquisition.

These practices are typically associated with predatory publishing, where questionable publishers cut corners to generate low-quality or fraudulent research papers in exchange for high publication fees.

Most of the companies named in the analysis did not respond to Nature’s requests for comment. David Radhor, relationship manager at Oxbridge Publishing House, says the company is “not a publisher” and does not directly own all of the titles in Martín-Martín’s preprint. (The study claims that Oxbridge has directors in common with some of the other companies, and suggests that it is part of a network of linked firms that are actively acquiring journals.)