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Hyderabad, India-based open-access publisher OMICS International is on a buying spree, snatching up legitimate scholarly journals and publishers, incorporating them into its mega-fleet of bogus, exploitative, and low-quality publications.

Sources indicate that OMICS has purchased the publisher Pulsus Group. In February, 2016, I reported on some strange activity surrounding the Canadian publisher Andrew John Publishing. Now is becoming clear that OMICS purchased Andrew John and is using it as a Canadian ‘base’ of sorts to purchase other Canadian journals, especially society journals.

The Pulsus Group website bears a London, UK address. Pulsus has published about two-dozen Canadian medical society journals, including these titles:
o Canadian Hearing Report
o Canadian Journal of Pathology
o Canadian Journal of General Internal Medicine
o Canadian Journal of Educators of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing
o Canadian Journal of Restorative Dentistry and Prosthodontics

The medical societies had contracted with Pulsus to manage the publishing of their journals for them, a common practice. Now there is panic among the staff and editors of many Canadian medical journals as they learn that OMICS International has purchased Pulsus.

OMICS International is not a bona fide scholarly publisher. It does not operate in good faith and victimizes honest researchers.

OMICS International is a major source of annoying spam and a threat to science. It is a predatory publisher and is included on my list. I have also added Pulsus to my list.

In addition, OMICS has set up a new publisher — called Open Access Journals — and is transferring some of its recently-acquired journals there.

OMICS’ new imprint Open Access Journals claims on its “contact us” page that it belongs to Pulsus and also shows a base in London, UK.

One of the journals in the fleet of OMICS’ Open Access Journals imprint is Neuropsychiatry. The journal has a legitimate impact factor and is included in the top academic indexes. The former publisher of this journal is Future Medicine. In fact, most of the Open Access Journals journals appear to have been purchased from Future Medicine.

A note on Future Medicine’s website says:

OMICS International is on a mission to take over all of scholarly publishing. It is purchasing journals and publishers and incorporating them into its evil empire. Its strategy is to saturate scholarly publishing with its low-quality and poorly-managed journals, aiming to squeeze out and acquire legitimate publishers.

Appendix

A. List of Pulsus journals as of 2016-09-23 (copied from the website)
1.Allied Hearing Health
2.Canadian Hearing Report
3.Canadian Hearing Report enews
4.Canadian IONM News
5.Canadian Journal of Educators of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing
6.Canadian Journal of General Internal Medicine
7.Canadian Journal of Medical of Sonography
8.Canadian Journal of Pathology
9.Canadian Journal of Respiratory Therapy
10.Canadian Journal of Restorative Dentistry and Prosthodontics
11.CASLPO Today
12.Clinical Investigation
13.Clinical Practice (Therapy)
14.Current Research: Cardiology
15.Current Research: Integrative Medicine
16.Diabetes Management
17.Imaging in Medicine
18.International Journal of Clinical Rheumatology
19.International Journal of Clinical Skills
20.Interventional Cardiology
21.Journal of Men’s Health
22.Journal of Sexual & Reproductive Medicine
23.Journal of the Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Disease Canada
24.Listen/Écoute
25.Neuropsy
26.Pharmaceutical Bioprocessing
27.Plastic Surgery
28.Plastic Surgery: Case Studies
29.Signal
30.Sound Matters
31.Vascular Access
32.Vibes
33.Wavelength

List of Pulsus journals as of 2016-09-28 (copied from the website)

1.Plastic Surgery (Canadian Society of Plastic Surgeons, Canadian Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, Groupe pour l’Avancementde la Microchirurgie Canada, Canadian Society for Surgery of the Hand)
2.Plastic Surgery: Case Studies (Canadian Society of Plastic Surgeons, Canadian Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, Groupe pour l’Avancement de la Microchirurgie Canada, Canadian Society for Surgery of the Hand)
3.Canadian Journal of Respiratory Therapy (Canadian Society of Respiratory Therapists)
4.Current Research: Cardiology (International Academy of Cardiovascular Sciences)
5.Journal of the Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Disease Canada (Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Disease (AMMI) Canada)
6.Canadian Journal of Medical of Sonography (Sonography Canada)
7.Canadian IONM News (Canadian Association of Neurophysiological Monitoring (CANM))
8.Current Research: Integrative Medicine
9.Journal of Sexual & Reproductive Medicine
10.Diabetes Management
11.Interventional Cardiology
12.Clinical Practice (Therapy)
13.Clinical Investigation
14.International Journal of Clinical Rheumatology
15.Imaging in Medicine
16.Pharmaceutical Bioprocessing
17.Neuropsychiatry
18.International Journal of Clinical Skills
19.Canadian Hearing Report

B. List of Open Access Journals journals as of 2016-09-23:
1.Clinical Investigation
2.Clinical Practice (Therapy)
3.Diabetes Management
4.Imaging in Medicine
5.International Journal of Clinical Rheumatology
6.International Journal of Clinical Skills
7.Interventional Cardiology
8.Neuropsychiatry
9.Pharmaceutical Bioprocessing

By: Jeffrey Beall
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Source: Scholarly Open Access

There’s a new open-access publisher that claims it is cooperating with Elsevier, but I think the claim is highly unlikely. The publisher — Qingres — claims it’s based in the UK, another claim I find doubtful.

The publisher’s main page has a rotating banner at the top with two slides. One (shown above) proclaims its purported association with Elsevier, and the other invites researchers to submit manuscripts to “Create a SCI journal with high impact factors.”

The publisher launched with seven medical journals, all broad in scope and all in disciplines already saturated with journals — there’s no need for these new ones.

The website is adorned with logos from legitimate companies and organizations, and there’s a long list of “Cooperative Institutions.”

The publisher has Photo shopped its name on a picture of a building somewhere, the second time I’ve seen this deception.

Qingres makes several mentions of SCI and impact factors on the website. At the bottom of some pages this statement appears:

We only wish the impact factor of this Journal to go up with time elapse!

In fact, the publisher has waived fees until the journals get indexed in SCI, something I estimate will take a very long time, if it ever occurs. In the “authors’ guide” for one of the journals, the publisher says,

The publication for JPBS is now free of charge. After it has been included in SCI, the publication fee would be charged.

They also reveal their lack of publishing experience by giving contradictory licensing policies. In one place they say, “Editors/authors who contribute in the JPBS will transfer copyright of their work to the JPBS publisher.” But in another place they say, “The majority of authors retain copyright for their articles and our standard license allows liberal reuse rights.”

The publisher’s internet domain name data is blinded, except for this:

Registrant Name: huifang jiao

Qingres — the name is not explained — is an optimistic yet poorly-conceived open-access startup. I recommend that researchers not submit manuscripts to its journals and decline invitations to serve on its editorial boards.

Hat tip: Dr. Judit Ward, et al.

Appendix: List of Qingres journals as of 2016-09-24:
1.Journal of Biomedical Frontiers
2.Journal of International Medical Analysis
3.Journal of Pharmacogenomics and Personalized Medicine
4.Journal of Precision Medicine
5.Journal of Psychiatry and Brain Science
6.Med One
7.Pharmaceutical Frontiers

By: Jeffrey Beall
Follow on Twitter
Source: Scholarly Open Access

Here’s the story of a professor at Michigan Technological University who appears to be very active on Wikipedia. He apparently tried to get the article about me deleted, and there is some evidence that he (or somebody) uses Wikipedia to promote his published articles. He is the subject of a Wikipedia investigation.

This busy guy is Joshua Pearce, an associate professor of Materials Science and Engineering and of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He appears to be another open-access / open-source zealot and apparently knows how to use Wikipedia to his advantage.

So, someone — apparently him — nominated the article about me for deletion. Nothing wrong with that — anyone in the world can make such a nomination, and Wikipedia has an open process for dealing with such nominations. In this case, the nomination was dealt with quickly — in a matter of hours in fact — with the encyclopedia concluding: “The result was speedy keep. No argument presented for deletion.”

The nomination was started by a guy using the handle “Gihiw” on Wikipedia. On the nomination page, there is a statement about this Wikipedia editor. It says:

“Gihiw (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.”

This account has now been blocked by Wikipedia. Now there’s another page on Wikipedia called “Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard.” On that page, there is a section about Joshua Pearce. It says:

“J. M. Pearce [edit]

While cleaning up citations to predatory journals I found a number of citations to Joshua Pearce (Pearce, JM). Other references in the same articles were also tot he same author, in different journals. I went through some histories and found that in each case the reference was added by a single-purpose account. I suspect there are a lot of them, here’s a brief sample:

o Pearce, J.M. o Wikiwarrior77 (talk contribs · logs · edit filter log · block log)
o Gihiw (talk contribs · logs · edit filter log · block log)
o EconomistfromtheFuture (talk contribs · logs · edit filter log · block log)
o Farmbob (talk contribs · logs · edit filter log · block log)

I understand that Pearce is an authority, but this is stretching credulity: every single article I find with citations to his work, the citations were added by accounts that appear only to edit articles where he is cited, and which usually add those citations themselves.

This will take a while to check through and clean up. Guy (Help!) 17:01, 30 August 2016 (UTC)”

Note that one of the Wikipedia editor names attributed here to Pearce is Gihiw, the account that nominated my article for deletion. So, is Dr. Pearce the person who nominated my article for deletion?

There is another page on Wikipedia with a section on “Citation spamming” that mentions Pearce. It says, ” Multiple additions of citations to the same author from predatory and other journals, by multiple editors with no history other than adding that material (i.e. probable citation spamming)”

Here we see that someone on Wikipedia suspects that a single Wikipedia editor is using seven accounts to add citations to Pearce’s published work. Is it Pearce himself?

Also, why would Pearce want to nominate my article for deletion? Perhaps his motivation lies in the fact that he has published in journals I have listed as predatory — here’s an example:

Pearce has published in the journal Modern Economy, from the China-based publisher Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP). This publisher is on my list, and I’ve blogged about the pseudo-science it has proudly published, without retraction, including an article that describes sentient civilizations living on the planet Mars.

This publisher is perfect for Pearce, and SCIRP published his sole-authored article (written under his real name) “Quantifying the Value of Open Source Hard-ware [sic] Development” last year. Note that SCIRP’s copyediting is so poor that they use an obsolete spelling of the word hardware.

Conclusion

So, the evidence points to the conclusion that a professor at Michigan Tech who, seemingly unhappy with my listing as predatory the bogus publisher he uses to publish his articles in, nominates the Wikipedia article about me for deletion.

At least one person on Wikipedia is investigating several apparent sock puppet accounts that engage in “citation spamming” to the benefit of Pearce, adding citations to his work (from both legitimate and predatory journals) to Wikipedia articles.

By: Jeffrey Beall
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Source: Scholarly Open Access

Comments:

TBOU says:

September 22, 2016 at 10:11 AM

There are quite a few like him on Wikipedia. One I saw a long time ago was this guy. The publications don’t seem that notable (many assistant professors of any discipline have similar records) and the open science advocacy seems minimal and not that grand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_S.I.D._Lang

Julian M. Stewart says:

September 22, 2016 at 11:50 AM

I find Jeffrey Beall to be reliable and spot-on.
I just tweeted a message concerning this attack on his credibility.
I suggest all those who rely on Dr. Beall do the same and perhaps he will receive well-deserved praise.

caly says:

September 22, 2016 at 1:36 PM

Maybe its a publish or perish thing. If he has lots of articles and lots of citations, maybe his pay is higher or something. If you really care about his ethics I’d let his department chair or someone know.

Krishnamurthy Bhat says:

September 22, 2016 at 10:30 PM

An associate professor of Materials Science and Engineering and of Electrical and Computer Engineering, publishing in “Modern Economy” it self speaks volumes about the research credibility of the individual.

CN says:

September 23, 2016 at 7:59 AM

I would not say that that in itself says anything about his credibility. Open source 3-D printable stuff has been a pretty hot topic from both the engineering and economic perspectives. It’s the grandeur and all this Wiki stuff…

Bill Williams says:

September 23, 2016 at 8:36 AM

Agreed – it is not unknown for scholars in technical areas to also publish in entrepreneurial/economic journals.

The grandeur is, of course, another matter entirely,

Joshua Pearce says:

September 23, 2016 at 2:51 PM

Dear Dr. Beall,
A colleague I respect spoke highly of you and sent me your blog post. Accusations on this blog based on anonymous Wikipedia editors falls into the same trap I am accused of (i.e. they are as groundless as deleting your page) – I respectfully ask that you remove them because from my perspective this looks a lot like a witch hunt using Wikipedia sock puppets. The charges are serious enough I felt the need to respond formally.
As you know I am a proponent of open source hardware – which must have struck a nerve somewhere for me to be a target of such a weird campaign. It is particularly interesting that this came out the day after I released public comment on Europe’s open access policy.
I have over 200 peer-reviewed articles that have been cited in the peer-reviewed literature over 5000 times. Most are sci-tech, but a few are policy related. A few times a year something our lab does makes the news – so it does not seem abnormal that some of them are used by Wikipedia. As I told you earlier I had ceased trying to help Wikipedia many years ago as for me it was a big waste of time. (See my obliterated article explaining the concept of “fill factor” as evidence). Note: this also means I am familiar enough with Wikipedia to know that attempting to delete your page would be pointless unless I was willing to spend hours defending the claims. Why would I bother doing that unless I was a moron?
To the best of my knowledge only one of my articles has been published in any journal on your list. The article was about calculating the value of open hardware. It was a follow up to an earlier article I published in Science. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/337/6100/1303
It definitely went through peer-review as I remember having to add more depth to the core example for revision. I believe it is technically sound – although the copy editing is messed up. It showed that the value created developing open hardware easily overcomes the investment. It said: “The inescapable conclusion of this study is that FOSH development should be funded by organizations interested in maximizing return on public investments particularly in technologies associated with science, medicine and education. ”
This conclusion has very serious repercussions for public funding of sci-tech in the U.S. (and public access to it for all uses) and I am sure makes some people angry. That said, if you are aware of actual flaws in the math or logic – please let me know immediately.
Due to the obvious potential for accusations of hypocrisy I wanted it in an open access journal — not a lot of good choices is this new field at the time. I am personally not happy with that particular publishing experience (non native English speaking copy editing) – I have also had poor experiences with the top traditional publishers.
I have no idea what the actual goals of the people/person was in messing with your account and smearing me. If you disagree with anything I have actually written (you can tell because I sign it) I am happy to debate – although I prefer it in some sort of legitimate neutral forum rather than blogs or Wikipedia talk pages where anyone can say anything.
Sincerely
Joshua Pearce

James Deakin says:

October 7, 2016 at 2:53 PM

A very courteous and measured response to what I must say feels like a rather unwarranted and deeply personal attack. I feel the somewhat contrived interpretation of the evidence presented in the original blog post does not justify what reads to be a somewhat mean-spirited commentary. I would be interested to read the author’s response to this post.

Tunke says:

September 25, 2016 at 7:21 AM

EconomistfromtheFuture doesn’t seem to cite Pearce anywhere in their edits. They do cite S Greenstein a large number of times and as their IP address geolocates to Cambridge, MT I’d suspect that they’re Shane Greenstein not Joshua Pearce.

Adam Jenkins says:

September 28, 2016 at 8:16 AM

I’ve been on Wikipedia for a long time now, and yes, this is a problem. However, there’s nothing in this case that would make me conclude that Pearce was behind it – of the accounts listed, two clearly had nothing to do with him, and the others can easily be explained given the likelihood of Pearce being referenced on those topics. There’s no investigation on Wikipedia – just a single person raising concerns, and no one finding anything to follow up.

In regards to your biography being nominated for deletion, that has a much more typical reason behind it. The intention was not to target you, but it appears to be retaliation against another editor on Wikipedia. Sadly, this is not particularly unusual.

MC says:

October 2, 2016 at 7:08 PM

Tend to agree. I have spent time editing on Wikipedia as well (still can’t believe my self-inclusion under “Bash Bros” was deleted) and I think you’re right. I usually side with Beall, but I don’t see the “zealousness” for open access from this guy.

Heysueus christo says:

October 1, 2016 at 10:23 AM

My my is little ol’ Joshie giving you an issue? Lol this guy is a clown. Problem is all these academic types can’t tell because most have never actually had to work for a living. Checked out what he’s famous the for (3D printing, recyclebot, extrusion pretty much) he’s acting like he’s on the cutting edge of technology and this is all new stuff. First off the plastic extruder has been around since the 60’s so we got lots of info about processes and technology. Second this grand environmental idea of recycling waste plastics for filament is garbage. Different polymers (plastics) have different melt temperatures, the screw in the machine is not sectioned (feed, transition, and metering sections) there is no mixing pins, second flight or even screen pack to give backpressure. He’s teaching kids stone age methods and telling them they are ready for the world, it’s a nice experiment to teach foundations but this is not progress. No one should be credited with an open source license, extrusion is older than the idea of the open license. All polymer processing uses extrusion. Injection moulding, blow moulding, 3d printing even, they all have an extruder component. You are in Colorado, go talk to someone at http://www.universalplasticsinc.com show them this guy’s work it will give them a good laugh. Peer review is useless if all the peers are morons… we should hold less faith in the paper people own and more in the logic of their ideas

Cureus is an open-access medical journal based in Palo Alto, California. It charges no author fees. I recently became aware of some possibly serious problems with an article the journal published in July, 2015.

First, a citation to the article in question, a review article:

Blum Kenneth, Badgaiyan Rajenda D., & Gold Mark S. (2015). Hypersexuality addiction and withdrawal: Phenomenology, neurogenetics and epigenetics. Cureus 7(7): e290. http://dx.doi.org/10.7759/cureus.290

My first concern is with the peer review, which according to the journal itself only took two days, followed by the actual publication of the article a day later:

I don’t know whether this fast of a peer review is acceptable to the medical research community or whether the fact that it is a review article justifies the fast review. Was the publication rushed to press because of the extra attention and page views an article on hypersexuality will deliver to the journal?

The journal has a very large editorial board, made up of world-renowned medical researchers. Are they okay with the fast peer review?

My second concern is with a big mistake that appeared in the article’s abstract when it was first published and how that mistake was handled.

The original abstract appears above; the corrected one follows. As you can see, the first one starts out with the clause “Hypersexuality is now part of the DSM-V …”. This phrase is removed from the corrected abstract.

How could such a fundamental error be published in a serious medical journal? The determination of whether a given medical condition is part of the DSM-V should be easy to make. It’s binary. If the authors of the article know so much about the topic, how could they make such a blunder? Why did the peer reviewers also miss the error? Did the fast peer review contribute to the mistake not being caught?

The original abstract still appears in the PubMed version of the article.

My third concern is that no correction notice appeared for the changed article. I think the Committee on Publication Ethics advises that publishers issue a correction notice whenever the content of an article is changed. I cannot find one for this change.

My final concern is that the journal has what appears to be a contrived metric:

It’s called the Scholarly Impact Quotient (SIQ), and it’s an article-level metric. I’m not sure it has any value and fear it could be misread or misused to make the articles and the journal appear better than they really are.

I think these issues I’ve identified are serious. I realize Cureus is a new journal and still finding its way. However, given all the lofty rhetoric on the Cureus website, such as “Cureus is the medical journal for a new generation of doctors and patients,” I believe that the blunders I’ve described here should not have occurred.

Cureus’ FAQ says, “In the future, Cureus plans to introduce paid, targeted ads from BioPharma … “. I hope the journal is able to get its house in order before it starts cashing checks from pharmaceutical companies.

Hat tip: Dr. Nicole Prause

By: Jeffrey Beall
Follow on Twitter
Source: Scholarly Open Access

Comments:

Ken Lanfear says:

August 20, 2015 at 10:38 AM

The Cureus review process is explained in their blog. Apparently, they invite a fairly large number of reviewers, hoping a sufficient number can meet a very short (1 week?) deadline. Obviously not perfect, and I am concerned about their errata policy.

The copy editing for Cureus is do-it-yourself. The blog already includes several laments about authors providing sloppy manuscripts. Is this really sustainable?

Cureus seems like an interesting and innovative experiment. It uses crowd sourcing to keep the expenses low, though I wish they were more forthcoming about their funding. Is Stanford involved? Also, I wonder about their long-term security against false science, gamed reviews, etc. Might be worth following and learning.

tekija says:

August 20, 2015 at 1:15 PM

Interestingly, an older paper by the Editor-in-Chief has an expression of concern attached to it:

http://www.cureus.com/articles/2543-extreme-tolerance-of-the-optic-nerve-to-ionizing-radiation-a-case-report-revealing-the-role-of-the-dose-volume-effect

The expression is completely opaque, because as far as I can judge it is neither dated nor specified.

Neuroskeptic (@Neuro_Skeptic) says:

August 21, 2015 at 3:39 AM

Good post. For more about Kenneth Blum see this post of mine.

Blum is the founder of United Scientific Group (USG), an OA publisher on Jeffrey’s list, and which Jeffrey reported is linked to the notorious OMICS group.

The two publishers certainly have a similar modus operandi including mass mails to researchers with invitations to conferences.

John R. Adler, Jr., M.D. says:

August 22, 2015 at 9:01 PM

Like every journal, Cureus is imperfect, and at times false statements slip through its pre-publication peer review process and make it into published articles. The current paper is a case in point, specifically with regard to hypersexuality being part of the DSM. Nevertheless, unlike nearly all other journals, Cureus emphasizes post publication review and enables a very simple process for commenting and tool for crowd sourcing article quality, i.e. SIQ. However in this case a handful of critics have unfortunately expressed reluctance to use Cureus’ comment process; I don’t understand such reluctance and assume they prefer to kill papers under the clock of anonymity. Regardless, the senior editorial team has embarked on an external investigation, directed by ICMJE guidelines, and a final adjudication of this matter will require process and patience. I am really not at liberty to say more at this time.

Despite the above incident, I do quarrel with the implication that somehow 48 hours, is as rule, insufficient time to review a manuscript. No reviewer ever spends more than a few hours actually doing a review so the “time required to review” is nothing more than the time allotted for reviewer procrastination. A long pre-publication review period merely means the reviewers took their time getting around to the manuscript.

Yes Cureus is different that nearly all other journals, and isn’t for everyone. However for extremely busy practicing clinicians who wish to report important but simple clinical findings without the cost and procedural overhead of many journals, while reaching the widest possible “open access” audience, Cureus has a lot to offer. I think if you are willing to dig deeper into Cureus you will discover that there is much to like! And yes, I would like “my doctor to read this journal”, because if s/he does, s/he will have ready access to and probably be practicing leading edge clinical medicine.

Neuroskeptic…..I have no idea what conferences you are referring to when you state that Cureus sends “mass emails to researchers with invitation(s) to conferences”? Perhaps you are confusing Cureus with some other open access journal

herr doktor bimler says:

August 23, 2015 at 6:48 AM

I have no idea what conferences you are referring to when you state that Cureus sends “mass emails to researchers with invitation(s) to conferences”?

When Neuroskeptic wrote about “the two publishers”, I read him as referring to United Scientific Group and “the notorious OMICS group”.

Dom says:

August 26, 2015 at 6:09 AM

While possible, 48 hours for a review is highly unusual – I say this from the viewpoint of being an academic editor as well as a reviewer of papers. Many a review will require extra digging, some help (information) from others, sometimes for literature to be sourced (few establishments can afford the breadth of journal subscriptions required for reviewing), and some simple reflection on the final review.

The suggestion that taking longer than 48 hours is laziness (or lack of application) seems to make light of the overly full diaries of most academics, who are after all doing this for free.

As to anonymity, it is sadly the case that there are large figures in many fields that no-one wishes to cross and that these individuals often have a big influence in grant funding. As such they hold the jobs of pure academics in their hands. Of course clinicians, such as yourself, can still pay the mortgage with earnings from the clinic, but the rest of us lack that second income stream, so we need that anonymity.

John R. Adler, Jr., M.D. says:

August 26, 2015 at 1:21 PM

I have seen first hand in and around this particular article the fear some researchers feel when being asked to render a judgment; I am astounded and at some point I intend to write my own blog about it. So yes I do feel the pain non-clinical researchers must witness when being asked to review articles non-anonymously. However, the Cureus model skirts this issue to some extent by virtue of the fact our journal is willing to publish all credible/plausible medical science that is presented in good faith, and then only AFTER publication sort out what is quality/important via our SIQ crowd sourcing tool, i.e. by design peer rejection is not a big part of our review process. It is my hope that this model of post publication review will catch on but for now that which is foreign is mistrusted by many a traditionalist. Meanwhile I cannot emphasize enough that in my hardcore world of clinical medicine many/most publications are observational in nature. Data analysis is almost secondary and oftentimes superfluous. With such clinical articles, and in the Cureus model, there is not a whole lot for a reviewer to judge…..unless the reviewer deems the obervations are totally bogus or fraudulent. This fact means that an extended review process is often little more than an opportunity for political meddling, which I have seen a lot on my 30 years of scholarly publishing!

John R. Adler, Jr., M.D. says:

August 22, 2015 at 9:05 PM

tekija…..with regard to the paper you reference (my own article in fact) what expression of concern are you referring to?

tekija says:

August 23, 2015 at 12:14 PM

Thank you for asking. When I navigated to that page on the day of commenting, it had a red bar the same color than in the “send comment” button just below author names with a white text “This article has an expression of concern”. However, I do not get it today.

John R. Adler, Jr., M.D. says:

August 23, 2015 at 1:12 PM

The only paper in the “history of Cureus” to host an “expression of concern” is: http://www.cureus.com/articles/3046-hypersexuality-addiction-and-withdrawal-phenomenology-neurogenetics-and-epigenetics

I suspect this was what you must have seen, especially since this paper was the focus of Jeff’s blog?

John R. Adler, Jr., M.D. says:

August 23, 2015 at 10:51 AM

herr doktor bimler……OK, I understand now that Neuroskeptic was not referencing Cureus. Clearly I was in a defensive frame of mind when writing! 🙂

By the way, I liken Cureus a lot to a peer reveiwed WordPress, where intelligent communication can be conducted, adjudicated and archived. This reference is perhaps understandable to this current WordPress audience.

Neuroskeptic (@Neuro_Skeptic) says:

October 13, 2015 at 5:04 AM

The paper “Hypersexuality Addiction and Withdrawal” has now been retracted: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4596082/ because it contained incorrect statements about DSM-V.

Although it will be back, we’re told: “In an effort to unambiguously rectify all errors, the authors have agreed to submit a significantly revised manuscript for subsequent peer review and re-publication.”

This raises the question of why it was corrected to fix some errors, but later retracted for the very same reason. Was the correction not enough?

John R. Adler, Jr., M.D. says:

October 13, 2015 at 5:56 PM

Speaking as the Editor-in-Chief of Cureus I can say that the published erratum to the “Hypersexuality” article addressed the vast majority of the incorrect statements around the DSM-V, and under most cirumstances would have been enough to rectify the situation. However, it turns out that the politics surrounding “hypersexuality as an addiction” are particularly vicious leaving little room for honest differences of opinion or inadvertent or even innocuous mistakes. So yes, you could say that the “correction was not enough”. But ultimately the above was my rationale for asking the authors to retract the article…..the newly published article can now be found at:

http://www.cureus.com/articles/3465-hypersexuality-addiction-and-withdrawal-phenomenology-neurogenetics-and-epigenetics

Having been personally pummeled, along with the journal, in the midst of what is largely a political spat, I intend to soon publish a blog detailing more of the story at play here, and illustrating how scientific discourse, can, in the age of social media, be easily held hostage to politics.

Venkataramana Kandi says:

October 27, 2015 at 12:15 AM

I take this opportunity to support the cureus journal. The issues raised by critics are simply to undermine the journal and hold no truth. The standard of most journals depends on the quality of editing that goes before publication and CUREUS gives certainly provides you best editing services free of charge.

Venkataramana Kandi says:

August 6, 2016 at 10:36 AM

Editorial quality stands higher than peer review. A journal with better Editorial standard would certainly overcome a weakened peer review process. Having published significant number of papers in CUREUS, I guess the editorial quality of CUREUS is really outstanding.

My personal experience with CUREUS tells a lot about its publication procedure. My review paper which i submitted to CUREUS passed peer reviewer but failed at the editorial approval and was rejected with elaborate suggestions to improve the paper.

This journal definitely is not for people having the habit of professional misconduct.

Venkataramana Kandi (K V Ramana)PhD, FAGE
A/Prof of Microbiology
Member Asian Council for Science Editors (ASCE)
Prathima Inst. of Medical Sciences
Karimnagar-505417
Telangana
India
email: ramana_20021@rediffmail.com
Alternate emails: ramana20021@gmail.com
Mobile: 9440704234
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ramana_K_v?ev=hdr_xprf
http://www.researcherid.com/rid/A-6331-2010
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7197-0448
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/venkataramana-kandi/31/b60/94b

Mac says:

November 28, 2016 at 12:48 PM

I have published with Cureus and I have to say their Editorial process is quite harsh and nitpicky. In my case I passed the peer-review process with flying colors but when time came for editorial review I had quite a few changes and additions I had to make in order to get it published. This is clearly not a paper for trash science.

Scientific spammer PLOS ONE is an ongoing source of amusement. Its peer review is regularly called into question, with the journal accepting unscientific papers. PLOS ONE increasingly resembles a lonely and un-selective digital repository more than a scholarly publication. Here’s a report of another PLOS ONE blooper.

Dr. Norman Sleep is a geophysicist at Stanford University. Recently, he received a spam email from PLOS ONE inviting him to conduct an ad hoc peer review of an article submitted to the journal (apparently PLOS ONE’s 5,000-member editorial board is only for show).

Here’s part of the spam email Dr. Sleep received from PLOS ONE:

From: PLOS ONE
Reply-To: PLOS ONE Date: Tuesday, August 16, 2016 at 9:03 PM
To: Norman Sleep
Subject: Reminder: Pending invitation to review PLOS ONE manuscript about to expire – PONE-D-16-24600 – [EMID:960690e1f258b755]

*Do not reply directly to this email. Please use the links below to accept or decline this assignment to avoid receiving automated reminders.

—————————-

Dear Dr Sleep,

We are writing to follow up on your invitation from Dr. Harry Zhang to review the below manuscript, which has been submitted for publication in PLOS ONE. The Academic Editor values your expertise and would greatly appreciate your time in reviewing the submission. This invitation will time out in 24 hours, at which point you will be unable to accept the invitation and review the manuscript. Please click the “accept” link below if you would like to evaluate this submission.

PONE-D-16-24600
Physical activity, energy expenditure, nutritional habits, quality of sleep and stress levels in shift-working health care personnel

The author list and abstract are appended below in addition to more detailed information about PLOS ONE and its editorial criteria. If you accept this assignment, you are confirming that you have no competing interests that may affect your ability to provide an objective evaluation. Our Competing Interests policy can be found at http://www.plosone.org/static/competing.action. If you have any potential competing interests, you should decline this assignment.

—————————-

So, as you see, the journal solicited Dr. Sleep — a geophysicist — to peer review a manuscript about sleep, which is far outside his area of expertise but matches his surname.

This is evidence that PLOS ONE is using a flawed, automated system for selecting peer reviewers.

Publishing in PLOS ONE is easy; the journal is not very selective. Its editorial board of over five thousand members apparently doesn’t perform too many peer reviews, and the journal mainly exists to generate income to subsidize the publishing of PLOS’s specialized journals.

Appendix: A spam email from PLOS ONE I received recently.

By: Jeffrey Beall
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Source: Scholarly Open Access

I think Science Publishing Group (SciencePG) is a totally bogus publisher. Here I would like to repeat my warning to all researchers that they not send any papers to this dangerous, pretend publisher.

I have written about this publisher here twice before, once in December, 2012, right after it launched, and once in June, 2014, when it became evident that the publisher would accept and publish absolutely anything, no matter how outlandish or unscientific it was.

I use screenshots from articles published in Science Publishing Group journals to illustrate the concept of “obvious pseudo-science.” Here’s one of the examples I use:

It’s an article entitled “Mathematical proof of the Law of Karma.”

The publisher claims it’s based in New York, but this claim is as false as the science it publishes. I’ve been told they’re really based in Pakistan, but calling their telephone number right now (+1 (347) 688-8931), after many rings, a young woman answers, speaking with what sounds like a Chinese accent.

“Where are you located?” I ask.

“Do you have inquiry about your paper?” she responds.

“What city are you in?”

“We in New York City.”

One of the reasons I am writing a third blog post about Science Publishing Group is that I regularly receive inquiries from people who have published in one of their many journals, researchers who soon realize they’ve made a mistake.

They write asking how to get out of the mess they are in.

Science Publishing Group preys on young researchers. It harvests data from local and regional conferences and, using smarmy language, invites each presenter to convert his or her presentation into an article for one of SciencePG’s journals.

I learned recently of an undergraduate research symposium in Ohio, in which this publisher sent spam emails praising the students’ presentations and inviting an article. In one case, the students thought the invitation was authentic and became excited, but a knowledgeable advisor was able to stop them before any harm was done.

Science Publishing Group now publishes 250 journals, and the titles of many of them begin with “American Journal.”

If you get a spam email from this company, I recommend you delete it immediately. Further, do not submit any papers to any of their journals. Science Publishing Group is a threat to researchers, a threat to science communication, and a threat to science.

By: Jeffrey Beall
Follow on Twitter
Source: Scholarly Open Access