As a researcher and as a member of
academia, you may have received emails from several publishers asking you to
submit your next article to their journal or propose a book title and may even
ask you to propose a new journal for which you may act as editor-in-chief.
Before accepting any such offer, it is critical
to verify that the publisher is legitimate. After receiving such email from few
publishers, it did not take too long to find out that I am not the only
recipient of these emails. These publishers aim at researchers from all around
the world and such emails have been received by several other colleagues. I
will share few such examples.
Science
Publishing Group
When I received an email from the
science publishing group asking me to propose a special issue for their journal
and be the lead guest editor, I was super excited. No, of course, not. It was
easy to find out that they send these emails to masses without even checking
for the field of interest of the prospective authors. Below, I am sharing the
email I received, and also text excerpts from the scienceblog which will be
helpful in identifying such sham publishers.
OK, So, that is interesting. You can
publish for free if you are the lead guest editor and you can 2-8 papers for
free if you invite others to publish in this journal.
Now, here is the text excerpt from the
scienceblog.
"Science Publishing Group is another scam Open Access journal
publisher or academic vanity press. Yesterday they sent me a form-letter
invitation to submit papers or become member of an unspecified editorial board
or become a peer reviewer. “Join us!” But they don’t even publish an
archaeology journal. The closest they get to one is a godforsaken excuse for a
journal namedSocial
Sciences. It allegedly caters to everything from law to
anthropology.
The best part is that they sent
the letter to my Academy address. The one I use when editingFornvännen,
a rock-solid paper and OA archaeology journal with 106 years of back issues.
Sorry guys, you picked the wrong dude.
Update
same evening: The
editorial board of Social Sciences has twelve members and apparently no
Editor-in-Chief. Only one of the twelve has filled out his CV page on the site,
making him the best candidate if you would like to contact the journal. He is a
professor of nanotechnology in Cheboksary. The journal’s web site however gives his
specialities as “Knowledge Discovery in Database, Data Mining and its using for
scientific and applied research, Social Science and Social Management, Family
relations and Educational Management”. Awesome."
[Excerpts from the scienceblog by Martin
Rundkvist]
Publishers
from India
These publishers seem to assign their own impact
factor. Their emails usually come with fancy titles such as “Publish in impact
factor journal”. For example, see the snapshot of one of the email below;
And to guarantee that your article will
get published, see the following statement
The reader may easily notice that this
journal is not indexed by ISI webofknowledge, yet the publisher claims an impact
factor of 1.252.
Not sure what these publishers have in their mind while sending this email and not sure how people get attracted to make submission.
Not sure what these publishers have in their mind while sending this email and not sure how people get attracted to make submission.
As time allows, I will also write on the nova publishers, the amazing story of paper
acceptance in Wulfenia Journal.
References;
www.scholarlyoa.com
References;
www.scholarlyoa.com
