Best way is not subscribe and publish in such journals. People (researcher) who are not able to publish in standard journals fell victims for such journals. They don,t have any peer review systems and standards. But people fall victims of such journals because it is easy way to get paper published !

Yes sir I definitely agree with rajasekharan PE. There r certain journals with in a hour accept and publish in a week. Such sitivation arise bcz of policy of PG and Ph. D students were complled to publish a paper before thesis viva voce may be two months after external submission. Peer reviewed journal won't respond so they have only option to publish in low grade journal

Check where the journal is indexed, like Pubmed. The cloned journals often list minor or fictitious index organizations.

What is a Clone Journal? Here is a paper about Clone Journals.

" Clone journal web pages are a counterfeit mirror of an authentic journal that exploit the title and ISSN of legitimate journals. In contrast to predatory journals, clone journals are more likely to accept papers from authors, since they have developed as the mirror image of reputable journals, including their domain name. Usually, they receive massive attention through claiming that they have earned high impact factors from reputable indexing agencies such as Web of Science and Scopus." (from below paper)

https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1516-31802019000600550

Dear David Damiyano ,

To my knowledge the following website is the most comprehensive site with all known journals that have been hijacked (or also known as a counterfeit or as you called it a cloned version of the real journal):

https://beallslist.net/hijacked-journals/

At the bottom of the list you see that it was updated june 08 2020.

Best regards.

PS. I am trying to built a list of examples coming up here on RG of (possible or most likely) hijacked journals in various questions I stumble upon:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/New_very_misleading_type_of_scam_Anyone_with_recent_examples

https://beallslist.net/

Article Clone journals: a threat to medical research

(1) False claims to be members of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA);

(2) False declarations of indexation in databases such as SCOPUS and Web of Science (WOS);

(3) Manuscript publication charges that are not visible;

(4) Non-transparency of the peer-review process, with unrealistically short peer review-to-publication turnaround times (e.g. one week);

(5) Non-existent publisher contact details: fake publishers do not have authentic postal addresses or any active telephone number; and

(6) Counterfeit publishers have small numbers of articles per year but have enormous editorial boards, or vice versa. @