Freie Universität Berlin has named Dr. Anna Abalkina the winner of its 2026 Rosalind Franklin Prize for Scientific Integrity, the university’s award for outstanding contributions to good scientific practice. The university announced the decision in a press release on July 23, 2026; the prize itself will be presented at a ceremony on November 25, 2026, the university’s annual Day of Good Scientific Practice.
Abalkina, a social scientist at Freie Universität Berlin’s Institute for East European Studies, is recognized for her research exposing predatory journals and paper mills, and for developing methods used to identify suspicious and compromised journals. She is the co-creator, alongside Retraction Watch, of the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, a continuously updated public list of confirmed hijacked journals that has become a standard reference tool for editors, librarians, and research-integrity offices screening submissions and citations. The prize carries a €2,500 award.
What a hijacked journal is, and why it matters
A hijacked journal is not the same thing as a predatory journal. In a hijacking, fraudsters clone the identity of a real, usually dormant or low-web-presence, print journal — copying its title, ISSN, and editorial branding onto a look-alike website — and then solicit and “publish” manuscripts for a fee, with no genuine editorial oversight or peer review. Authors believe they are publishing in the legitimate title; in reality their work, and their article-processing charge, has gone to a fabricated outlet trading on someone else’s reputation. Because the underlying journal name is often real and previously indexed, hijacked journals can slip past citation checks and institutional whitelists that a more obviously fake, wholly invented predatory title would not. This is distinct from the broader predatory-journal problem catalogued by tools like Beall’s List, and from the industrial-scale fabrication problem tracked under paper mills, though all three overlap in practice: paper mills have been documented placing fabricated manuscripts through hijacked and compromised venues alike.
Abalkina and Retraction Watch launched the Hijacked Journal Checker in 2022 as a searchable, regularly updated database of confirmed cases, giving editors, librarians, and integrity offices a concrete way to check a suspicious submission or citation against a documented list rather than relying on ad hoc judgment.
The runner-up: practical data-sharing agreements
Freie Universität Berlin also recognized a runner-up in this year’s competition: Jun.-Prof. Dr. María Piquer-Rodríguez, a geoscientist who leads the university’s Modelling Human-Environmental Interactions working group, received a €1,500 prize for developing practical “Data Agreement” templates that clarify responsibilities and usage rights for shared research data. According to the university, the templates are already used in teaching and research at Freie Universität Berlin and have been adopted by other institutions.
Announcing the results, Freie Universität Berlin’s Vice President for Research, Prof. Dr. Maria Kristina Parr, said: “Dr. Anna Abalkina and Jun.-Prof. Dr. María Piquer-Rodríguez make outstanding contributions to scientific integrity in different ways.” The Rosalind Franklin Prize, now in its second year at Freie Universität Berlin, is open by nomination to researchers at all career stages at the university, for exceptional contributions to research and teaching integrity, outstanding science communication, or innovative approaches to promoting good scientific practice. It is named for the British biophysicist Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray diffraction work was central to determining the structure of DNA but went largely unrecognized in her lifetime.
Why this matters for research-integrity offices
Journal-identity fraud is a persistent, practical screening problem, not an abstract one: an author or a co-investigator can cite, or unknowingly submit to, a hijacked title without anyone involved realizing the venue is fraudulent until well after publication or payment. Recognitions like this one give institutional research-integrity offices, library teams, and grant administrators a more visible, citable reference point for tools they may already be using informally — and a reminder to build a hijacked-journal check into manuscript and citation-screening workflows alongside existing predatory-journal and paper-mill checks, rather than treating the three as interchangeable.
Abalkina’s broader body of work spans corruption in higher education, academic misconduct, plagiarism, and the economics of predatory and hijacked publishing; Nature named her one of ten people who shaped science in 2024, citing this same body of investigative work.
