PRAY So You Don’t Become Prey

Cloned journals refer to deceptive or counterfeit scientific journals that imitate genuine scholarly publications with the intention of misleading scholars into submitting their works. As early career researchers fall prey to these hijacked/cloned journals, research in this direction is important. In this paper, we present “PRAY—Published Research Attestation sYstem”, to validate the research papers published in a journal. We develop a novel random number generator to generate a journal secret key (jsk) based on satellite beacon signals. HMAC of ISSN number with manuscript DOI using keyed jsk; attestation code (ACODE) is generated. This attestation code is used to verify and attest the validity of the genuine publication. The system is tested and validated through verification in Scopus database.