Recently, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article about predatory open-access publishers in general and specifically about India-based OMICS Publishing Group. This article has generated leads into potential new questionable publishers. Thanks to everyone who has emailed me with these suggestions.
The list below includes publishers that people have asked me to investigate. Disclaimer: Inclusion on the list below does not necessarily mean that a publisher engages in unethical or unprofessional practices.
1. Journal of Global Health Perspectives. This single journal has not started publishing yet. It will be published by a vague organization called First Aid WorldWide, a group that does not list its headquarters location on its website, an omission that always makes me suspicious.
2. WIT Press Journals. I have received several inquiries about this publisher in the past. However, it looks like this is not an open-access publisher, so it’s out of scope for my research. Still, there may be some significance to my having received so many inquiries about this outfit.
3. Science Publishing Corporation. The domain-name registration for this publisher has a United Arab Emirates address. None of its five journal titles has any content yet, so I’ll continue to monitor this publisher. Good luck.
4. [Redacted]. This publisher does not appear to make content from its five journals available open access. Instead, it appears to charge five dollars to access each article. Also, it appears to charge authors three hundred dollars to publish a paper. I’ve found that new publishers like this one can rapidly change their finance model when they realize that one is failing, so I’ll check back to see how this publisher progresses.
5. North American Business Press. This publisher’s content is behind a pay wall; it is not open access as far as I can see.
6. Research Publisher. This firm markets twelve journals, all with a very broad coverage. I will be looking into possibly adding this one to my list.
7. International Journal of Engineering Science & Advanced Technology. This stand-alone journal appears to be run by the same outfit as IJERA, the International Journal of Engineering Research and Applications. They both recently started publishing and are based out of India.
8. The Journal on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, also called, the Journal of Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics is also one I’ll be looking into.
Reading: Tonight I’ll be reading an article entitled “Cheating at the highest level” / By Aoun Sahi. This article originally appeared in The News on Sunday in Pakistan and describes some bogus publishers. Here are two links to the short article: one, two.
By: Jeffrey Beall
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Source: Scholarly Open Access
Comments:
David Lester, PhD says:
March 8, 2012 at 6:07 AM
This blog/website is really useful. Thank you. However, would it be possible to also include a list of open access publishers that you have investigated and which meet acceptable critera? It might be good to have a list of criteria for being acceptable, and have an EXCEL spreadsheet which lists each open access publisher and notes which criteria each meets and does not meet.
Best wishes
David Lester, PhD
Robin Hood of Plant Science says:
April 5, 2012 at 1:39 AM
Dear colleagues,
Same post at http://metadata.posterous.com/83235355
More insight into my thinking here and hopefully a web-site soon…:
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/02/thousands-of-scientists-vow-to-b.html
Although I give a million kudo’s to all on this blog for fighting the good fight, and particularly to Jeffrey for publishing that list, you all sound like squealing mice scurrying here and there for answers. Ironically, even the Directors and CEOs of publishers like Tom Hill of LA-Press and from Hindawi have to come to this blog to defend who and what they are. How ridiculous the world of publishing has become! Maybe we should applaud them for actually coming to this blog and trying to set their records straight. If every single CEO of the scam publishers that are listed on that list were to come forward as, for example, Tom Hill did, then we might actually get somewhere. And at the same time, they have to say and watch everything they say provided it’s OK’d by their lawyers. Someone once said that when you call in a lawyer then you know you’re guilty (para-phrase). What happened to science? It has been hijacked no doubt by marketing buffs, online engineers and larger powers that most are not aware of. The biggest problem now is that any Tom (not necessarily Tom Hill), Dick or Harry can become a publisher. As long as you have some WordPress, HTML, PHP, Flash and Illustrator or other programming skills, you are half-way towards starting your own OA scam business. With as little as a 5-10$ downloadable web-page template at a wealth of template banks, whose to blame the weasels at the bottom for seeing a capitalistic opportunity? Not fair to only target the Nigerians, although they could probably take the crown. This festering cancer is coming out of Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, India, Eastern Europe, Turkey, etc. Lax US laws that allow foreign individuals to buy a PO Box and even a fake CEO allow for them to set up shop in the US, even without a single person there fan the flames. How do you think the Indian management got the Hindawi and Nova Publisher scams to work? How do you think MetaPress, run out China under a US address got its success? How do you think Iranian-run Southern Cross Publishing got an Australian CEO? Wake up, people, it’s not the scammers who are responsible, it’s the official bodies and governments who are allowing this to breed, provided that they can pull in some taxes, they look the other way. We are dealing more than with just concrete web-sites and nothing-to-lose mentalities that have given us the Enron-, Wall Street type culture in science publishing, we are dealing with a sea of cultural mind-sets that are perceiving success in different ways. However, those measures are being controlled by a few key players (see next). For now, those in “godly” positions are sitting on their ivory towers laughing at us and at this mess of the OA war. The Big 5, as they are called in Africa, would be easily expanded to the Big 100 (I have the list on my desk-top as we speak), with the top 10 being Elsevier, Springer SBM, Wiley-Blackwell, CRC Press and Taylor & Francis, Hindawi, OUP, BMC, Nature Publishing Group, SAGE, Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG.
For a second, I would like you to detach from publishing, and tell me what the following have in common: US Fed, Bundesbank, London, Mario Draghi, ECB, Greece, Super-PACs, 911, Libya, Iran?. If you didn’t yet figure out the links yet, you most likely never will. Let me helpo you: RT.com. Let me take a step further. Provided that Big Publishers like Elsevier, and the root core of all publishing evil and power, Thomson Reuters, stop paying off the US Government with campaign contributions and the will to manipulate hundreds of laws, including SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, RWA, NDAA, CISPA, etc. and until publishers stop being run by marketers and those involved in the military-industrial complex and this bubble of crony capitalism, there is no wonder that there is this wild rush to secure the bottom echelon of science and science publishing. While you ignoramuses on this blog pull and shove about which scam publisher is dirtier, vying for bottom place, follow the power and money trail and everything will be crystal clear.
Juicy tit-bit for your to feast yourselves on: VDM publishers… of course the list I have has about 100 publishers that dwarfs Jeff’s little list, but that will come out later this year!
Other entities directly responsible for this mess and not doing enough to fix it: ISSN, ISBN, so-called “ethical” bodies like COPE, WAME, ICMJE, the NIH, Ministries of Education globally (bought out by the Big 10 and Thomson Reuters (a hypothesis yet to be proved)), ISO.
The biggest culprit, however, is the author and scientist.
The BRICS (for those who have no idea what I am talking about, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) poses a dangerous precedent in terms of the future of science publishing. Even though the BRICS provides a good counter-balancing force to the EU (mainly Anglo-Franco)-American imperialistic policies, in terms of science, these countries are on super-shaky ground, so if you thought that the state of OA publishing was bad, this is just the starter! Although I do give strong credit to FREE OA by scielo.org which should be the model to follow. Japan is just like their Korean counter-parts following US policies like a bunch of sheep, when in fact they could be the perfect moral spring-board for things to start to be straightened out.
Science is unfortunately no longer only science. It is society. It is the 80% Google-owned internet, it is Facebook and Twitter and the social media revolution. It is dirty politics and bottom lines. It is the Troika. It is Wall Street and the soon-to-be 4th Reich. Let’s face it, if you add Tom Hill’s name to any respectable data-base, you certainly don’t see his name as an academic. So, although I praised him above, let’s be honest, he’s not in the publishing business for the “love of science”. He’s in the business to see how rich he can get and if he can upgrade that BMW to a Porsche perhaps (if he doesn’t already yet have one!). NO matter who runs the OA business or not, very few (the 1%) run it for the love of science. The top 99% run it for profit. When a paper costs 350 US$ or 3000 US$, the discussion should not be, wow, the first choice is cheap and the second is not. The true discussion is why any of these publishers are charging scientists anyway for their intellectual brilliance? Anybody ever heard of royalties? Or maybe these hienas, including ALL on Beale7s list and any publisher who charges a dime, think that a PDF that can be read by Google is a “bargain”. You’re all greedy scum. That’s the bottom line.
In one of the blogs (maybe this one?) I read today, someone said (roughly), we should not turn this into a witch-hunt. Unfortunately that person is so naive into believing that the law is actually on the side of those who are legal (i.e., the authors)! If the USA (and allies, forced or voluntary) can invade any country it wants to expand its power on oil, kill millions of innocent civilians, if Thomson Reuters and Reed Elsevier can own massive law firms and rape the data of the world to build their empires while paying off the same “law-abiding” USA Government, then how do you honestly believe that these small-fry publishers should respect you, me or anything we believed in since the day we were born scientists? This is the age of rape and pillaging, so if you intellectual farts want to blame someone, don’t blame the Nigerians, blame the US Government and its allies for all the dirt it has reigned upon the globe. Blame yourselves for sitting ata blog rather than protesting in front of your Ministry of Education.
When you eventually come out of those little corners of those lab-benches and book storage rooms in the basement, or the dark room where you have been blogging all day, you will realize that the mess is so massive, so massive. And there is only one solution to this. Revolution.
2012. The year of the Science Revolution. I have been calling for it since 2011. Heed my warning.
Stuart Strother says:
April 17, 2015 at 11:59 AM
You put North American Business Press on this list just because they have a pay wall? Elsevier charges $31.50 to access an article. Meanwhile, all these articles are freely available if your organization subscribes to databases such as Proquest or Ebsco. Your pay wall criterion is inappropriate.
Konstantinos says:
September 13, 2015 at 1:01 AM
Dear Mr. Beall,
I received an e-mail from an OA academic publisher named FSSH Scholarly Journals. Could you please review it?
http://fssh-journal.org/index.php/home
Thanks a lot
Jeffrey Beall says:
September 13, 2015 at 6:24 AM
It’s a completely bogus “publisher.” I have added it to my list. Thank you for alerting me to it.
Mary says:
July 25, 2016 at 4:28 PM
Hello –
I gave a presentation at a national conference this spring and was sent an email by the Journal of Organizational Psychology (North American Business Press) recommending that I submit my paper for publishing. My paper was accepted, and I was asked to pay a subscription fee of $300. Is this legit?
Thanks so much for your help!
Jeffrey Beall says:
July 26, 2016 at 4:36 AM
In this case, the publishing fee may be a total rip off. You have to transfer your copyright to the publisher, the publisher is a low-quality one, and it’s not open-access. You will be paying them to hide your paper in a low-quality journal. I recommend finding a stronger, more standard journal.
