AI, Clone Journals vis-à-vis Publication Ethics and Misconducts

This paper investigates how the explosive development of digital academic publishing and the emergence of AI have led to serious research integrity issues mainly through a rise in clone journals and predatory journals. It analyses AI's dual role in the transformation of scholarly communication by highlighting benefits and risks. Adopting a doctrinal method, this paper looks at major ethical topics including authorship, peer review, honesty, and open-access publishing. It is careful to make a distinction between clone journals (fraudulent replicas of legitimate journals) and predatory journals (profit-motivated, low-quality publications that abuse open access models). One of the main inquiries is whether AI supports research integrity or whether it also facilitates misconduct. On the one hand, AI programs are used for plagiarism identification, journal tracking, and research productivity enhancement; on the other hand, they are exploited for creating fraudulent papers citations altered data, and also for supporting paper mills. The article draws attention to the problem of AI authorship which can create difficulties concerning accountability and intellectual property. The paper also mentions laws and ethical standards, including global legal considerations and India's mechanisms that regulate academic integrity violations. Operations and economic incentives behind clone journals and their detrimental impact on academic trust and knowledge systems are discussed in detail. The paper ends with a proposal for a multi-layered reform approach involving legal institutional technological, and ethical measures. It also stresses the importance of a good combination of AI advantages and robust safeguards for the preservation of academic integrity.