Science - page 4

Most all high-quality scholarly publishers assign DOIs (digital object identifiers) to the articles and other digital objects they publish. These unique identifiers benefit scholarly authors by making their work more discoverable, accessible, and citable.

One Luddite publisher that refuses to use DOIs is the Clute Institute. In fact, one of the “Institute’s” editors-in-chief has even badmouthed the international standard.

Timothy F Slater, Ph.D. is a professor at the University of Wyoming and Editor-in-Chief of the Clute Institute’s Journal of Astronomy & Earth Sciences Education (JAESE).

Here’s what he said in the context of his journal not supplying DOIs:

One specific criticism of JAESE is that we currently do not use DOI numbers to specify permanent URLs for archived articles. The DOI system was created in the 1990s to solve the problem of unstable URLs when using Netscape and Mosaic to find online resources. Many publishers think that the DOI system has outlived the problem it was trying to solve, especially as membership in the DOI system is expensive for small publishers and, it seems to me, largely unnecessary these days. The Editorial Board is currently reconsidering DOIs, but members are understandably reluctant to pass more costs on to authors, if it is unnecessary.

Slater’s comment was posted to the Geoscience Education Research Interest Group email list hosted by Michigan State University on March 19, 2015. I don’t think Slater’s description is accurate.

DOI’s first started to appear in the 2000s, and they serve to provide unique and persistent identifiers for scholarly articles and other digital objects, identifiers that enable precise and unambiguous identification of scholarly works, along with many citation-based services.

Also, I’ve never heard any publisher say anything even close to Slater’s silly claim that “Many publishers think that the DOI system has outlived the problem it was trying to solve …”.

It is shameful that such a statement would come from a professor of education. He may be confusing the DOI with PURLs.

I recommend that researchers stay away from the Journal of Astronomy & Earth Sciences Education. It charges both submission and publishing fees, and it does not assign DOIs to the articles it publishes, leaving its published authors at a disadvantage.

By: Jeffrey Beall
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Source: Scholarly Open Access

Comments:

Blazeyastic says:

May 8, 2015 at 4:44 PM

Jeff are you saying every journal with DOI are suitable for publication than those without it? Remember, there some of your listed predatory journals with DOI, thanks.

Jeffrey Beall says:

May 8, 2015 at 4:48 PM

No, I am not saying that.

Sudesh Kumar says:

May 9, 2015 at 2:30 AM

what Jeffrey is saying that the editor does not know what he is talking about…as the editor says “…especially as membership in the DOI system is expensive for small publishers…”
the charges for a small publisher comes to be about $500-800 per year. either the journal wants to save this amount using excuses or the journal is not earning enough to pay this amount…both of which are bad scenarios…

Robert says:

May 10, 2015 at 8:01 AM

CrossRef normally charges 280$ as an annual fee plus one dollar per paper for assigning doi. This fee is associated with small publishers. The fee is nothing compares with advantage people get. Another point is that the managers of some well known indexes such as Scopus only index journals with valid doi. In other words, if a publisher does not cooperate with CrossRef, it is getting difficult to receive valuable index. I believe escaping from DOI membership is a good sign of a predatory activity. This publisher probably knows sooner or later they will have to close their operations so they do not bother to get involved with doi operations.
However, many well known small OA publishers take advantage of doi system and scholars benefit from it.
I believe all Librarians must help scholars know more about the advantages of a journals with valid DOI. I am glad to see that when a publisher tries to receive Scopus index for its journals there is a link to keep track of (See http://suggestor.step.scopus.com/progressTracker). ISI index also provides a link to get the status of journals, but the link often does not give feedback. Here is the link:
http://ip-science.thomsonreuters.com/info/jrneval-status/
It seems that ISI people are very busy, disregard offering any feedback to scholars and I think within the next few years, Scimago index, which is based on Scopus will break the monopoly of ISI, completely and most universities around the world will depend only on Scimago index.

Robert says:

May 10, 2015 at 11:49 AM

CrossRef normally charges 280$ as an annual fee plus one dollar per paper for assigning doi. This fee is associated with small publishers. The fee is nothing compares with advantage people get. Another point is that the managers of some well known indexes such as Scopus only index journals with valid doi. In other words, if a publisher does not cooperate with CrossRef, it is getting difficult to receive valuable index. I believe escaping from DOI membership is a good sign of a predatory activity. This publisher probably knows sooner or later they will have to close their operations so they do not bother to get involved with doi operations.

David says:

May 10, 2015 at 3:44 PM

DOI has nothig to do with quality of a publication. It is not essential to assign DOIs to articles as it is a value added service. So don’t mix DOI assignment with quality of publication. If publishers don’t want to get registered with CrossRef…….it’s their choice…….Actually many people are working to support the corporate agenda…..Now see DOIs also become a corporate product…….These corporate people just want to fill their pockets………….by sucking our blood…….like bats……

Ken Lanfear says:

May 11, 2015 at 6:21 AM

Jeff, I feel not having a DOI may be a dumb choice, but it is not illegitimate and does not imply bad faith. The EIC is up front about this, so there’s no more deception than a journal that, say, chooses to publish only in paper.

You do your list a disservice by including a journal for this reason. There are plenty of genuine bad actors to worry about.

Jeffrey Beall says:

May 11, 2015 at 8:03 AM

Ken,
Nowhere in my blog post did I mention anything about deception, so I don’t understand why you are arguing against something I did not say or imply. Why are you putting words into my mouth? Moreover, you imply that I put Clute Institute on my list for a single reason, which is also untrue. I find your comment irresponsible and unfair.
Jeffrey Beall

Ken Lanfear says:

May 11, 2015 at 5:36 PM

Sorry, Jeff. I didn’t mean to imply you were alleging bad faith. However, “I recommend that researchers stay away from the Journal of …” seems a pretty harsh sentence for a journal just exercising its business judgement.

geocognition says:

May 11, 2015 at 11:50 AM

I am in the field this “journal” covers, and we need more reputable publication options. I am concerned that young scholars will mistakenly publish here, and their work will be tarnished.

The lack of DOI is troubling – papers will be lost to oblivion. Even more so is the concern I have that the journal is not actually peer-reviewed – although cryptic, it seems that the “advisory board” of the journal also serve as reviewers for papers. This is not legitimate peer-review.

Stephanie Slater says:

May 18, 2015 at 3:48 PM

Upon reflection, this conversation seems a bit too removed from reality, and it might be helpful to bring it back to earth. …. It should be noted that there are real people who have published their work in some of these journals, and that should factor into the equation here. We are not talking about the work of faceless minions. When you besmirch the reputation of a journal, you are by extension, casting shadow on the scholarly work published therein, and to a certain extent, questioning the value of the work these individuals have done. That should be done with more care than is being demonstrated here… In the case of JAESE, the journal has taken on the specific mission of creating a publishing space for those who are traditionally marginalized in the patriarchal academic system. The first four articles were all written by American women, who have their PhDs from American institutions. In the case of three of the articles, these works are the publications of their dissertations, and represent over a decade of research overseen by well-respected scholars in their fields. In the case of the fourth paper, I am the author. My published article is a piece of research that I saved back for the specific purpose of starting this journal off on a strong foot. It is a description of the development of a research instrument that has been used in over 20 studies in the US, including four dissertations, conducted at R1, American universities under the supervision of well-respected scholars…. The fifth piece is a retrospective written by a very-well respected astronomy educator in the United States, who himself served as the editor of a journal for over a decade. …. The editor of JAESE is a full-professor, an Endowed Chair of Excellence in Science Education, has won an extraordinary number of awards in his field, who has graduated more PhDs in his field than any other person in its history….so it’s possible that he knows a thing or two about what constitutes real research in his field. … And the Editorial Board is really quite amazing. ….None of those features of this journal have been discussed in determining whether or not the journal is legitimate, which is quite disturbing. …. Before labeling a journal as predatory or a scam, it seems that reading the journal, contacting the editor, or authors, or members of the editorial board, are the minimum acts of due diligence. … Without taking such measures, it seems that negatively labeling the journal is an act taken to silence the respected voices who have chosen to publish there, which in this case could very easily be read as sexism in the academic workplace. I’m not sure what else one would call such unsubstantiated slander against a journal that purposefully chose to feature four, solo female scholars. ….Until such time as Mr. Beall conducts due diligence, academic integrity would demand that he retract the statements that he has made regarding the quality of this journal, of its board, it’s editor, and the work published by its authors.

Concerned Commentator says:

July 6, 2015 at 3:06 PM

Do you think it matters that you are married to the editor of the journal under which you were published? Do you think it matters that you two have a financial arrangement with the publishers? Are you willing to disclose what that arrangement is since the authors are charged page fees? How much money will you and your husband make from running this journal?

Anirud says:

March 28, 2016 at 10:27 AM

Came to this late but I find it a little puzzling how doctoral theses works were published here ( see Stephanie Slater comment above). Clearly, ppl want it in an A or B. If not of that quality, generally such theses are not seen as worth the paper. If JAESE were really of B or higher standing, it would not need such vigorous, spirited defence, would it? And not many buy into this patriarchal claptrap any longer. It is just another excuse. That said, DOI or payment alone should not be the criterion for blacklisting. In the case of Clute, I think there are more indicators than that, making it look highly questionable.

The journal Agrociencia, published by the Colegio de Postgraduados in Mexico, demands that submitting authors subscribe to the journal before their submissions will be considered for peer-review. A subscription costs $160, and there are additional fees once the paper is accepted.

These hidden fees, resembling a type of mordida, are not mentioned in the author guidelines. The text below is copied from an email sent by Agrociencia in response to a prospective author’s inquiry:

“Time for publication: 8-10 months, depending upon writing in fluent English and scientific value of the manuscript.

Articles are published only in English and Spanish.

After an official reception letter is issued and in order to start the peer-review process, the corresponding author must pay a one-time annual subscription to Agrociencia (US$ 160.00); this payment does not imply that the manuscript will be published.

If the manuscript is approved for publication, the corresponding author must pay the translation (US$ 200-300) from English into Spanish, directly to a translator assigned by Agrociencia.”

The journal’s website states that subscriptions cost $150, not $160. Also, the journal is open-access, so subscriptions are not needed to access the published content.

As indicated, the journal also requires submitting authors to fund a translation of the article, an additional $200-$300 cost.

The journal is also called Revista Agrociencia. The mandatory subscription and translation charges are non-standard in scholarly publishing and perhaps unethical. The journal needs to be more transparent about the fees it imposes on its authors.

Researchers in the agricultural sciences submitting papers to this journal will be taking a risk; there may be additional charges beyond those mentioned here. For authors considering submitting here, I recommend finding a better journal.

The journal has an impact factor of 0.049 according to Thomson Reuters’ Journal Citation Reports.

Hat tip: Dr. Jaime Teixeira da Silva

By: Jeffrey Beall
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Source: Scholarly Open Access

Comments:

Keith Fraser says:

April 21, 2015 at 9:13 AM

Publication time 8-10 months? That seems terribly long to me, on top of all the fee unpleasantness.

Neuroskeptic (@Neuro_Skeptic) says:

April 21, 2015 at 9:40 AM

“The journal has an impact factor of 0.049 according to Thomson Reuters’ Journal Citation Reports.”

Statistically significant!

shirley ainsworth says:

April 21, 2015 at 10:55 AM

Although seen from another angle an APC of $150 plus a complimentary print subscription is hardly outrageous, and also the equivalent of ‘society members’ (academics and students from the Colegio de Posgraduados) do receive a discount on this price.
I understand this policy has been in force for Agrociencia since 1997, and it is unusual for a Latin American journal to charge for publishing there. They are usually free to publish in and free to access.

The conditions should be mentioned clearly in the author instructions, I quite agree.

Rodrigo Paredes says:

April 21, 2015 at 12:51 PM

This is not an article processing charge. In my experience, APCs are only charged after acceptance. Here “this payment does not imply that the manuscript will be published.” I do not know of any other Journal that charges the complete fee regardless of acceptance (maybe they’re a few, but it is very uncommon and does seem risky for authors.)

Mike Fainzilber says:

April 22, 2015 at 12:49 PM

Jeff – I have no idea about this specific journal, but fees for submission of a manuscript are charged by other reputable journals published by large scholarly societies. For example the Journal of Neuroscience charges $ 130 for submission, regardless of the eventual fate of the manuscript, and this is separate from publication fees charged if the manuscript is accepted for publication- see http://www.jneurosci.org/site/misc/ifa_fee.xhtml

Jeffrey Beall says:

April 22, 2015 at 8:18 PM

Agreed, but the point I was trying to make is that the fees are not mentioned on the website. Authors find out about them the hard way, after they’ve submitted a paper.

Reinaldo Pire says:

May 1, 2015 at 10:33 AM

Dear Prof. Beall, it is clear that your comment was dealing with fees that were not mentioned on the website of the journal. However, you used the term “mordida”, a word that may be considered offensive for Spanish speaking people.
I believe that this unusual word in scientific communication triggered several opinions from readers who added more attacks to the journal.
Moreover, I visited the journal website and observed that the charges are mentioned on its main page.
Knowing that you are a fair scientific critic, I think a clarification would be needed

Jeffrey Beall says:

May 1, 2015 at 11:33 AM

You are late to the party. The charges were not stated previously. My use of the term was appropriate and reflected only the offensiveness of the hidden and exploitative charges.

Sergio González says:

May 7, 2015 at 1:18 PM

On April 21, Mr. A. Teixeira da Silva uploaded on the Scholarly Open Access site, a libel pointing out that Revista Agrociencia charges “MORDIDAS” (sic) for publishing articles. Although we knew about the apparent anger of Mr. Teixeira da Silva, we did not answer because his statements are worthless and uncalled for and, most probably, no reply is needed. However, some outstanding members of the national and international scientific community have let us know their disagreement and anger about the libelous statement published by Mr. Teixeira da Silva. Therefore, we feel an answer is called for.

First, we will show some relevant information about Agrociencia. In 2016, the journal will reach 50 years of publishing, and it is successfully consolidated with about 400 reviewers from 12 Ibero-American countries. Two reviewers and one editor evaluate each manuscript, and they will approve or reject it. Every year, about 100 articles are published according to the Guidelines, which are in effect since 2004; thus, about 1000 have already been published and none of the authors have complained about subscription fees or payment to translators.

Mr. Teixeira da Silva pointed out just one true statement: Agrociencia is an open journal, its access is free in the Internet, and no subscription is required in order to read, copy or print any article. Thus, the only purpose of requiring a subscription is to help paying some of the publication costs of the journal. If an author declares that he cannot pay the subscription, due to lack of funds or not being able to obtain support from his country, this requirement is forfeited. Please, take into account that the one time annual subscription requirement is included in the Authors Guide and in a letter sent to the Corresponding Author. Hence, Mr. Teixeira lies again.

But we do declare ourselves guilty of not being able to find excellent translators who do not demand payment for his work. Since translators are not employees of the Colegio de Postgraduados, neither of the Editorial or Agrociencia, every payment for translating a manuscript is a direct agreement between the Corresponding Author and the translator.

Finally, we strongly point out that no further words or efforts will be wasted about this trivial incident, which stem from faulty judgment or wicked intentions from Mr. Teixera da Silva. A final comment: as is often the case, Mr. Teixeira writing in English is very poor. That is why professional translators are required. The rest is silence.

El Editor General del Colegio de Postgraduados
Said Infante Gil

El Director de Agrociencia
Sergio S. González Muñoz

In a recent blog post, I wrote about the Taiwan-based Higher Education Forum — essentially a travel agency that organizes vacation-like conferences marketed to academics in Asia. In this post, I would like to expand on why I think attending Higher Education Forum (HEF) conferences is a poor choice for honest researchers.

Here are the reasons I think that researchers should avoid Higher Education Forum conferences and why universities should not pay for their faculty to attend Higher Education Forum conferences

1. HEF is a for-profit company whose mission is to increase profits for its owners. On the other hand, conferences organized by authentic, non-profit scholarly societies and associations have as their chief mission the creation and sharing of new knowledge. Honest researchers should prefer conferences organized by legitimate academic and scholarly societies and associations.

2. Higher Education Forum conferences generally combine two (or more) broad fields. They do this to make the conferences appeal to more researchers, to maximize their revenue. Here are some examples:

International Conference on Education, Psychology and Society
International Conference on Social Science and Psychology
Global Conference on Engineering and Applied Science
International Symposium on Engineering and Natural Sciences
International Conference on Life Science and Biological Engineering

3. Note that all of HEF’s conferences use the terms “International” or “Global.” This strategy helps attract more registrations and enables presenters to earn more academic credit (an international conference presentation garners more credit than a national or regional one).

4. To maximize profits, HEF often holds two or more conferences at the same time and at the same hotel

5. HEF associates with predatory publishers and works to funnel conference attendees’ papers into the low quality journals they publish. On the HEF website, it says, “All full papers presented in the conference will be considered for possible publications as follow [sic].” Then it provides links to publishers in India, Nigeria, and China that appear on my list of predatory publishers.

6. Higher Education Forum does not take criticism well. After my last blog post, HEF’s public relations manager, Chelsea Kao, sent out numerous emails, each one labeled as a “press release” attacking me and defending the company. Her numerous press releases cited the impact factors of all the journals that HEF associates with, but the impact factors were all assigned by fake impact factor companies, so the silly press releases, which were sent to various University of Colorado officials, confirmed that HEF associates with predatory publishers.

7. For conference presentations, there is a very short time between the submission deadline and the “notification of acceptance,” leading one to conclude that no real review is completed on the submissions, and they are most all accepted so the conference can make more money. Also, the deadlines invariably get extended. There’s no mention of any peer-review.

8. HEF conference registration is not cheap; it costs $400 to attend for those presenting papers. According to the website for one of their conferences:

“The calculation of registration fee is according to the piece of manuscript submitted by the author. For instance, if you only have one paper to submit, you will have to pay 400*1=400 USD. However, if you would like to submit three research papers, you will have to pay up to 400*3=1200 USD.”

They also charge a processing fee for those using PayPal, and they do not grant refunds for any reason.

Higher Education Forum organizes vacation packages and markets them as scholarly conferences. The firm associates with predatory publishers and encourages conference attendees to submit their papers to these publishers’ journals, where they are easily and quickly published upon payment of additional fees paid by the authors.

I recommend that scholars only attend scholarly conferences organized by authentic scholarly organizations. I recommend that universities not sponsor faculty attendance at conferences that are essentially vacations, like those given by Higher Education Forum.

By: Jeffrey Beall
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Source: Scholarly Open Access

Comments:

Ken Lanfear says:

March 13, 2015 at 7:50 AM

Jeff, I see “vacation conferences” as a far less serious threat than predatory journals. Even legitimate conference planners know it’s easier to attract folks to nice places, at least within reason. Since it’s often not a clear-cut situation, trying to restrict travel could cause more problems than it would solve.

Conference proceedings papers usually count far less than journal papers for tenure and advancement. Someone looking to promote fake science would get more bang for the buck paying a predatory journal.

The problem of predatory journals is very real and threatens the credibility of our science. I think “vacation conferences” are largely a problem between employees, employers, and the tax collectors.

AlexH says:

March 13, 2015 at 11:14 PM

Conferences are all about networking and are not a tool of fattening our list of publications. With the exception of a few fast-evolving fields like computer science, proceedings publications (even those that are published as a special issue of a scholarly journal) count very little for promotion or grant committees. However -and this is the part where I must disagree with Ken-, fake conference proceedings pollutes scientific literature the same way as predatory journals does as they often give space to sub-par or even pseudoscience and grant an opportunity for citation manipulation. IMHO they are a very real threat to science even though misled or unethical authors are not able to profit from them as much as from predatory journal articles.

Julius Jillbert aka JJ (Julius Jilbert) says:

April 7, 2015 at 3:16 PM

Thanks again Jeffrey for this useful information. Would share this as a remainder for others academe.

Peter Kutschera says:

July 5, 2015 at 5:28 PM

While I respect the overall mission of SOA and its estimable proprietor Dr. Jeffrey Beall, I was somewhat taken aback by this article’s “over the top” headline: “Higher Education Forum: 95% Vacation, 5% Scholarly.” That plus the piece’s rather cursory examination of… OMG… a “for-profit” company – one that in my humble opine is also providing an invaluable academic service and research conference paper exposure opportunity in a very, very vital part of the world. This is especially so for young and aspiring researchers and even older seasoned academics . The many who often find themselves shut out from having their hard work recognized. Or, those who become unfairly burdened by receiving yet another rejection slip from the exclusive and short number of establishment, super highly competitive, sometimes subjectively challenged and occasionally clubby brick and mortar journals SOA recommends as one of the only real alternatives. I am a proud participant, presenter and moderator at a number of HEF conferences in East/Southeast Asia and in Taiwan- the Republic of China, and have encountered many intensely motivated, serious, hard working professional researchers, often in the prime of their careers, who have left me highly impressed with their accomplishments and resolve to contribute mightily to the literature. These conference participants are equally as impressive as the many I’ve also met @ the research association conferences SOA also rightfully recommends. In the interests of improving its value to readers I wish your article and inquiry might have been more “balanced,” and rather less “prosecutorial” in its approach and tone. Unfortunately the incandescent headline and a chunk of content is unfair and not adequately vetted. The article’s basic premise that HEF is a “travel agency” is provocative and gratuitous. How many research and professional conferences stateside conducted by responsible universities and colleges are held routinely at such “travel” destinations as Las Vegas, Miami, Myrtle Beach, New Orleans, St. Petersburg-Tampa, Charleston, SC, Seattle, San Diego or San Juan, PR? Usually I would imagine 95% of attendees at these events are there to make a contribution and that’s what I believe you would encounter attending a HEF conference

Jeffrey Beall says:

July 5, 2015 at 6:00 PM

I stand by my criticism of HEF and recommend that honest researchers not waste their money (or their university’s money) and time attending its vaconferences. Your arguments are fallacious and you should reveal that HEF pays you to give your boring “keynote” talks at some of its almost weekly-held conferences. Evidence shows that this firm has contractual agreements with predatory journals in South Asia and West Africa, journals that use fake impact factors and do little or no peer review, accepting everything submitted. Publishing in such journals could be extremely damaging to the careers of young academics. The ridiculous PR person for HEF sent numerous “press releases” to my university chancellor (apparently she doesn’t know how to do any normal type of correspondence) and her statements revealed that the company is completely clueless about fake impact factors, fake peer review, and predatory publishers. Your comments about attendees of conferences here in the U.S. are unwarranted. Stop trying to play the attendees of different conferences off of each other. This is about HEF and only HEF. It’s a low-quality and questionable conference organizer, and the fact that they hire you as a keynote speaker provides strong evidence for this.

The Journal of Current Research in Science (JCRS) is included on my list of questionable journals, and I strongly advise all honest researchers to avoid it. It allows up to 40% plagiarism in its articles and proclaims several completely fake impact factors. Surprisingly, a new scholarly index from a reputable firm has made the decision to include this journal in its coverage.

High Tolerance for Plagiarism

A prominent note at the top of the journal’s website says:
“JCRS is following an instant policy on rejection those received papers with plagiarism rate of more than 40%.”

This means the journal will accept and publish papers with up to 40% unoriginal content, a highly-questionable practice that violates established scholarly publishing ethical norms.

Fake Impact Factors

The journal also displays false impact factors to make itself look more legitimate. It has made-up numbers from Global Impact Factor and Universal Impact Factor. These are counterfeit impact factor companies that sell their contrived metrics to predatory journals, metrics the journals use to attract papers.

The journal prominently displays the logo of the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), a new database from Thomson Reuters — the same company that calculates impact factors. I verified that the journal is included in this index.

ESCI is an attempt by Thomson Reuters to better compete with Scopus, which has a much broader coverage than Web of Science, Thomson Reuters’ main index.

If Emerging Sources Citation Index is including journals like the Journal of Current Research in Science — with its fake impact factors and high tolerance for plagiarism — then ESCI will have little value and will gain a reputation as a dirty database.

Non-Scientific Content

I also note the presence of out-of-scope content in the Journal of Current Research in Science, including, for example, the article “The Ratio of Islamic philosophy and religious thought.”

The article does not fall into the journal’s stated scope (current research in science) at all. Moreover, it, along with the journal’s other articles, has not been copyedited and contains numerous errors, such as “lunarcolander” instead of “lunar calendar.”

Conclusion

If this journal fits into Thomson Reuters’ idea of “emerging sources,” then I question the company’s competence in evaluating open-access journals. The journal misleads researchers with fake impact factors and permits a high level of plagiarism in its published articles.

Hat tip: Janusz Mierczynski

By: Jeffrey Beall
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Source: Scholarly Open Access

I’ve added the journal Interdisciplinary Toxicology (interTOX) to my list. The journal is associated with the Slovak Toxicology Society (SETOX).

In my opinion the journal is not aimed at communicating science but instead aims to promote a political agenda, namely that most manufactured chemicals cause harm to humans.

The journal’s editor-in-chief is Michal Dubovický. According to Dr. Paul Strode, author of the blog Mr. Dr. Science Teacher:

Dubovický has 53 career publications according to the Web of Science. Since June of 2008, when Interdisciplinary Toxicology was launched, he has published 27 times. Two of those publications were editorials in Interdisciplinary Toxicology and 10 were full length papers in the journal. So, 40% of Dubovický’s publications over the last six-and-a-half years are in his own journal!

The journal was brought to my attention recently because of a 2013 article it published co-authored by MIT’s anti-Roundup crusader Stephanie Seneff. The article was “Glyphosate, pathways to modern diseases II: Celiac sprue and gluten intolerance,” and it appeared in volume 6, number 4 of the journal in 2013.

According to Dr. Strode:

Stephanie Seneff is a 65-yr-old computer scientist in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Like [her co-author] Samsel, Seneff has magically become an expert in glyphosate biochemistry and human disease while maintaining a career in artificial intelligence. Seneff’s last eight articles have also been published in the journal Entropy, which means she and her coauthors have spent $10,816.00 to publish in the last two years.

Wait, did he say Entropy? Yes, he did. Who publishes Entropy? MDPI, one of the publishers on my list. Stephanie Seneff and her co-authors have successfully used this MDPI journal as their own scholarly vanity press, publishing eight papers in it since 2012.

An excellent blog post about Seneff and her questionable research appeared in the ScienceBlogs blog Respectful Insolence on December 31st.

People with science/political agendas are increasingly using journals like Interdisciplinary Toxicology and publishers like MDPI to disseminate their work, work that quality journals will not publish.

When publishers like MDPI disseminate research by science activists like Stephanie Seneff and her co-authors, I think it’s fair to question the credibility of all the research that MDPI publishes. Will MDPI publish anything for money?

By: Jeffrey Beall
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Source: Scholarly Open Access

Comments:

Evert Nijenhuizen says:

January 8, 2015 at 9:48 AM

Entropy has an impact factor of 1.564. So, with other words, perhaps the SCI Index-system might be corrupted as well. This requires further investigation. We might have something big here.

Jeffrey Beall says:

January 8, 2015 at 10:21 AM

It’s feasible that some of the MDPI journals get cited a lot because so many researchers cite their articles to refute them as junk science. These additional citations drive up the impact factors, and this may be one of the reasons the publisher accepts the junk in the first place. Ditto for the articles’ altmetrics.

Sudesh Kumar says:

January 8, 2015 at 10:11 AM

but isn’t i true that such incidence can occur with any journal irrespective of it being open access or closed access? there is nothing to stop an editor-in-chief of a closed access journal from published his own papers in his journal or publishing papers ascribing to an agenda.

herr doktor bimler says:

January 8, 2015 at 4:03 PM

A case in point is the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry from the Elsevier stable. Seems reputable enough, but they have published guest-edited Special Issues such as this one in 2011:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/01620134/105/11

— guest-edited by Chris Exley, an aluminium-causes-everything anti-vaccine obsessive (and Seneff co-author), and packed with papers every bit as egregious as the open-access examples.

wkdawson says:

January 8, 2015 at 11:13 AM

I must admit that I was rather surprised at encountering this biosemiotic entropy… I really don’t have any idea what Knuth was thinking when he approved this series.

Moreover, some of the articles do not even have the word entropy anywhere in the body of the article. It doesn’t appear that the guest editor did much of anything or simply agrees with this view. The least that could have been done was tone down the assertions.

Anatoli says:

January 8, 2015 at 12:02 PM

Does it mean that journals should also inquire about the science/political agenda of the authors before accepting articles? Isn’t editorial and peer review enough? Let the public and blog writers do the former and journals do the publishing only instead off turning into social and political watchdogs.

Jeffrey Beall says:

January 8, 2015 at 1:50 PM

They’re not doing a legitimate peer review; that’s the problem. OA publishers want to earn as much money as possible so they accept unscientific papers and then pocket the author fees. MDPI published eight papers from this author in two years.

bueller007 says:

January 8, 2015 at 12:38 PM

See also this PubPeer thread. All of Seneff’s Entropy publications were in a single special edition of the journal, which was edited by a linguist who advocates unorthodox health views and who later coauthored a publication with Seneff that made heavy use of references from the “special edition”.
https://pubpeer.com/publications/C7497636B078354505F94D13F72C27

herr doktor bimler says:

January 8, 2015 at 12:57 PM

publishing eight papers in it since 2013
I think you mean “since 2012”.
All but one of those articles were in the “Special Issue Biosemiotic Entropy: Disorder, Disease, and Mortality”, which might more accurately have been called the Seneff Special Issue. Dates are confusing because the Special Issue was released in dribs and drabs over a couple of years.

It doesn’t appear that the guest editor did much of anything or simply agrees with this view.
The guest editor (John W. Oller, Jr) was an antivax loon who writes about the “autism epidemic”. Let us say that he had an agenda.

Her most recent paper — “Biological Water Dynamics and Entropy” — is an attempt to rehabilitate Homeopathic Magic Water, disguising it in a sepia bafflegab cloud of

quantum coherent nanomolecular clusters of magnetized water.

herr doktor bimler says:

January 8, 2015 at 1:32 PM

I am surprised that Seneff and co. published “Biological Water Dynamics and Entropy” in “Entropy”, when it would be more appropriate for “Water” — another journal from the MDPI, devoted to “the special properties of the second phase of liquid water, resulting from its quantum-coherent behaviour at room temperatures plus an alternative value of the phase of the quantum vacuum”.

RobRN says:

January 8, 2015 at 5:23 PM

Jeez – That’s all we need… MORE of Stephanie Seneff’s pseudo-scientific word salad available as ammunition for use by fringe elements!

Sunday Brownson Akpan, Nigeria says:

January 10, 2015 at 5:31 AM

Hello Beall
Please comment on the following journals/publishers.
Should i submits manuscripts to them?

(1) Expert journals of Economics (www.expertjournals.com)
(2) Journal of Global Agriculture and Ecology published by International Knowlegde press
(3) Mitteilungen Klosterneuburg (http://mitt-klosterneuburg.com/)

Anticipating your responses

Jeffrey Beall says:

January 10, 2015 at 9:10 AM

(1) Expert Journal of Economics (www.expertjournals.com)
I had not heard of this publisher before (Expert Journals). I analyzed it and found that it meets the criteria for inclusion in my list, so I have added it. I would recommend that you not submit your papers here. The journals are all broad in scope, perhaps to increase submissions and therefore revenue, and all four journals have the same co-EiCs, at least one of whom is the owner of the outfit.

(2) Journal of Global Agriculture and Ecology published by International Knowledge Press.
As far as I can tell, International Knowledge Press is not an open access publisher. I limit my work to open-access journals and publishers, so I have not fully analyzed this publisher. My guess is that this publisher’s journals have very few subscribers, so in submitting your work here you’d not be getting very much exposure for your work.

(3) Mitteilungen Klosterneuburg (http://mitt-klosterneuburg.com/)
This is the hijacked version of a legitimate journal. Please ignore the version of the journal that is at this website. See my list of hijacked journals here: https://scholarlyoa.com/other-pages/hijacked-journals/

Google Scholar is the world’s largest and most-used academic search engine, yet it is increasingly becoming polluted with junk science, making it a potentially dangerous database for anyone doing serious research, from students to scientists.

The problem is that Google Scholar aims to be comprehensive, indexing articles from as many scholarly appearing journals as possible. On the surface, that goal seems noble, but a closer look reveals a major flaw in the strategy.

Because predatory publishers perform a fake or non-existent peer review, they have polluted the global scientific record with pseudo-science, a record that Google Scholar dutifully and perhaps blindly includes in its central index. Most predatory journals are included in Google Scholar. The database does not sufficiently screen for quality, in my opinion.

Google Scholar works well for known-item searches, for example, when you quickly need to locate a known article or a paper by a known author.

It performs poorly, on the other hand, at finding an article on a specific topic. It doesn’t use controlled vocabularies and includes junk science in its index. If you aren’t an expert, you are unable to separate out the junk science from the authentic science, and both are included one after another in Google Scholar search results. For those seeking the top scholarly literature on a given subject, the best resource is a focused, high-quality, curated database licensed by a library.

Junk Science

Predatory journals are also enabling the publication of much “activist science,” publishing articles that appear to be scientific but that could never pass peer review and be accepted and published in authentic journals. Activists publishing pseudo-scientific articles indexed in Google Scholar include:

o Those promoting hypotheses that mainstream science has found to be false, such as claiming that vaccines are the etiology of autism, or claiming that nuclear power is more dangerous than has been shown to be true

o Those denying hypotheses that mainstream science has found to be true, such as those denying that global warming is occurring

Additionally, people are using low quality scholarly journals to pursue personal theories or interests. These include:

o Those claiming far-fetched cosmological discoveries or theories that are impossible to prove or disprove

o Those publishing obvious pseudo-science, such as researchers documenting alien sightings

o Those using predatory journals to support a business interest, such as those promoting a new, unapproved medicine

o Those abusing the established taxonomy protocol to name species after themselves

The Future of Science

Science is cumulative, with new research building on findings already recorded in scholarly books and journals. When junk science is published bearing the imprimatur of science, later scientists may inadvertently use that work as the basis of their work, threatening the integrity of their results.

Google scholar does not sufficiently screen for quality and includes much junk science. To remain relevant and valuable. Google Scholar needs to limit the database to articles from authentic and respected scholarly publications and exclude articles from known publishers of junk science.

By: Jeffrey Beall
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Source: Scholarly Open Access

Comments:

T Anthony Howell says:

November 4, 2014 at 9:15 AM

While your mention of curated library databases are a solid recommendation, there are plenty of “junky papers” in many reputable “acceptance only” indeces, such as MEDLINE and PubMed Central.

I applaud Google Scholar’s ability to provide information to the public and scholarly community outside of these somewhat exclusive and manipulated database – not to mention the decades of skewing bio-medical evidence through the underreporting of negative trials and overreporting of positive trials.

Ultimately, the evaluation of the value and trustworthiness of the information needs to be performed by the consumer of that information.

conan the librarian says:

November 5, 2014 at 12:51 PM

While your point is well taken,the reputable sources you mention are at the very least suppose to adhere to some written acceptance policy. While Google Scholar is not ‘hindered’ with any written or professional policy – or do they have one?
In addition, while you cite the negatives of the ‘reputable’, do you want to muddy the waters by adding more negatives?
The consumer seeks these sources to become informed, albeit the info is not perfection, and not to evaluate the trustworthiness of sources.
Perfection will not be reached but if the attempt is not even made more negatives than positives will be present.

Nils says:

November 4, 2014 at 9:18 AM

I would never, ever, use Google Scholar to find articles on a specific topic – there are far better databases for that. The database is useful, though, to find articles by a specific author. It can also help finding articles citing one’s own work, that one might otherwise miss. However one has to keep in mind that the database includes many items which are not reviewed articles, such as proceedings, dissertations and slides of talks. Hence it would also be dangerous to use Google Scholar for bibliometric purposes.

Yurii says:

November 4, 2014 at 9:19 AM

Lack of proper curation in the majority of databases with automated or semi-automated information-gathering methods is a serious problem. Google Scholar is simply the most visible, and (hopefully) the least used in professional circles. It is more problematic when poorly curated information percolates into more specialized databases, that we use for hypothesis generation/testing. In the last couple of months I stumbled upon several rather egregious examples when poorly-vetted information affected interpretation of experimental results in several papers.

fredmurr says:

November 4, 2014 at 9:37 AM

This is a great blog, could you cite some examples of personal theories of the kind mentioned. I would love to showcase this to my students.

Joe Walder says:

November 4, 2014 at 9:51 AM

The librarians I deal with recommend using Google Scholar along with other databases. (I do research in the Earth sciences.) My anecdotal impression is that Google Scholar captures more articles relevant to me than do other search engines. The down side is that Google Scholar also sweeps up junk, by which I do not necessarily mean “junk science”, but simply irrelevant material. Keyword searches using any Google application are just prone to that.

My anecdotal impression is that Google Scholar gets many more “hits” on work by authors outside North America and Europe than do other search engines. Some of this stuff is junk, but some looks to me like decent work. For example, I have found good quality work published in a journal that is put out by an Indian professional society but published by a Western publisher. And I’ve found relevant papers in Chinese journals (I happen to be able to read some Chinese) published by universities or government labs. Commonly I’m just trying to “mine” papers like this for examples to add to some databases. And I’d say Google Scholar also does a much better job of finding papers in the Japanese literature (some of which is published in English) than do the other search engines that I’ve used.

Let’s be very careful not to conclude that scientists in countries that host junk journals are necessarily doing junk science. And let’s also be aware that seeing the name “Indian”, say, in the title of a journal does not mean it’s a junk journal.

Riaan Stals says:

November 4, 2014 at 11:08 AM

Hooray for this opinion piece!

Being a taxonomist by day, I have little problem finding [only] good stuff with Google Scholar. My institution, a national science council in South Africa, cannot afford an index-controlled, curated bibliographic database.

At night I am an avid reader of scientific matter in a wide spectrum, and it is then when the black spots in Google Scholar reveal themselves. Whereas taxonomy, by day, is rather clear-cut and professional experience allows the rapid detection of poor science (which has always been there in any case), it appears that the humanities and medical sciences served by Google Scholar suffer particularly badly from the inclusion of anything and everything that is published under the veil of science. And it is, of course, in my hobby interests where I do not have sufficient or professional insight to throw out the chaff.

At night I am in exactly the same situation as all tertiary students would be: misled by the Google Scholar stakes, unable to tell apart white and black and grey, but still entirely dependent upon its services.

Google Scholar is a blessing to the reading fraction of the developing world. But it may be time for much more stringent quality control. And can the service, perhaps with a controlled vocabulary and high curation costs, then still be offered free of charge?

J.J. says:

November 4, 2014 at 12:24 PM

The usual principle behind Google’s products is to index and search everything that is online. The only ‘curating’ is in the ordering of the results. I doubt that Google will make any efforts to stop returning bogus science.

It has always been clear to me that judging the quality of Google Scholar hits is on me. I think most sane researchers have realized this as well.

dzrlib says:

November 4, 2014 at 12:29 PM

In addition, Google Patents has a less than satisfactory search engine. It provides excellent PDF copies of US patents, but their scanning (unless recently improved) is like dragging the trash pond behind a suburban strip mall. Its numerous problems are well documented. http://patentlibrarian.blogspot.com/2008/09/comparison-of-free-patent-databases.html

MG says:

November 5, 2014 at 2:10 AM

As someone said before this is an interesting blog but I really would like to see some examples. I also noticed that there are a lot of non-academic articles in the subject-specific databases we usually recommend to our students, so it would be interesting to showcase the difference.

Neuroskeptic (@Neuro_Skeptic) says:

November 5, 2014 at 4:39 AM

Scholar would greatly benefit from the ability to order the search results by citations.

At a stroke this would make it easy to filter out 90% of the “junk”.

Implementing this would be very easy for Google so we can only assume that the lack of a citation ranking option is a deliberate choice, perhaps an attempt to avoid the “Matthew Effect” (cited papers get to the top of the ranking and get cited more.)

Neuroconscience says:

November 5, 2014 at 6:58 AM

While I understand the sentiment of this post, I think the message is wrong headed. As others have said, of course there needs to be some basic filtration method for citations. But at the same time, this points more to a need for stronger and more widespread post-publication peer review mechanisms. Pre-publication peer review is itself doing a pretty bad job of quality control; the answer isn’t a more restrictive publication mechanism but a better quality review mechanism.

Dave Langers says:

November 5, 2014 at 8:10 AM

I would precisely NOT use Google Scholar to search for particular papers by particular authors. If you have that much info, a database (mostly PubMed, in my case) works just fine.
Also, I don’t get the impression that Google Scholar is hugely infected with bogus results, or perhaps these are just so obvious that I ignore and hardly notice them. It is certainly not “unworkable”, and some common sense in interpreting the results of a search is always healthy (for curated databases too).
In contrast, what I find very useful about google is that its search engine is not overly sensitive to variations in spelling, or even synonyms perhaps, is my impression. It does not suddenly return no search results because of an ill-defined keyword. You can just type some stuff you may be interested in, and let google make sense of it. That makes it ideal – in my opinion – for searches where you are not entirely sure about what paper you are looking for. The more “exploratory” searches, say.
In summary, as with all literature, interpret sensibly, use the pros, circumvent the cons, and make the most of the tools you have available.

Dave Langers says:

November 5, 2014 at 8:19 AM

As an example, I keyed in a search query on what happens to be my field of interest: “methods to determine tonotopic organisation in human auditory cortex”. In PubMed I got only two papers, which were neither the best nor the most relevant. On Google Scholar I find an almost uncountable number of results, and the first few pages contain no junk whatsoever.
You might say that I don’ t formulate my query well enough for PubMed (to which I would not normally submit such a freeform expression, I admit), but that is precisely the advantage of Google Scholar: it doesn’t punish you for that.

Jeffrey Beall says:

November 5, 2014 at 9:03 AM

Excellent, then you can continue to use Google Scholar for your research.

Riaan Stals says:

November 5, 2014 at 10:26 AM

This is rather humorous. I entered “methods to determine tonotopic organisation in human auditory cortex” [note your own parentheses] into GS, with this result:

” Your search – … – did not match any articles.”

T Anthony Howell says:

November 5, 2014 at 8:24 AM

Google Scholar closely rivals specialized bibliographic databases.

See How readers discover content in scholarly journals – the results from a large scale reader survey – stm 2013—–in particular Slide 8 – Starting Points for Researching for Articles – Trend from 2005 to 2012.

yklein2 says:

November 5, 2014 at 10:53 AM

I use Google Scholar (the version licensed through my institution) on a daily basis. I use it in three ways: !, when I have basic information (author, year) and I need a complete cite; 2, when I need to find an e-journal copy for which our library has a license; and 3, to do key-word or topic searches Within my area of research, I take responsibility for separating the wheat from the chaff. (There is plenty of both.)

behalbiotech says:

November 5, 2014 at 10:13 AM

good topic, It’s funny to see some researchers even writing citations to their publications on the basis of google scholar. even claims were made that researchgate should show citations on the basis of google scholar. No doubt google scholar may give easy idea regarding papers published by a researcher but citations part is really bad. Further it brings out the papers/data published in predatory/fake journals, which is not reliable and should be avoided.

DS says:

November 5, 2014 at 10:49 AM

Peer-reviewed is not equivalent to good science. The author of this rant is making a big mistake. If you can’t tell the difference between junk or questionable science in a particular field then you are not an expert in that field and should stay away from that literature. Open post-publication review is the future.

Emmanuel says:

November 5, 2014 at 4:46 PM

I’m proudly Nigerian working in Ghana. To us here, Google Scholar is a blessing. It does not matter if some persons feel it “promotes” their so-called junk science! Let us be realistic here because not everything that is from Nigeria, India or Pakistan is a junk. Of course not everything from the United States, Canada, Australia and Western Europe is genuine. Please be fairer in your judgement. I rest my case.

Google – not! says:

November 5, 2014 at 7:56 PM

This is an important issue. I don’t know a single scientist who doesn’t use Google Scholar. When ding a scan for the latest literature, for example, to develop the introduction or discussion of a paper, most scientists would look towards a few main data-bases, most likely Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science, Elsevier’s Scopus/sciencedirect, Springer Science + Business Media’s SpringerLink, and possibly Wiley-Blackwell’s Wiley Online and even Taylor and Francis Online. To a much lower extent, DeGruyter Online, which has only recently started to make gains. But the spiders at Google and to a less extent those at Yahoo, are exceptional at tracking PDF files. In some cases, publishers may, for an additional fee, get their websites and files read more effectively by Google. This may be the case of Academic Journals, a Nigerian-based OA publisher listed on Beall’s list. The bottom line is, during a search for academic articles, most scientists will at least browse through Google Scholar, so this discussion is important, and relevant, even if many here offering comment appear to show vastly contrasting differences of opinion. One can also state that Google Scholar is important, precisely because it has the powerful tools to accumulate so much information, junk or not. So, I do agree that the fine line between quality and bad quality is beginning to become increasingly thinner, and that rubbish is mixed with great science when doing a search on Google Scholar, but perhaps, rather than lauding it as an academic data-base, perhaps we could be using it to our advantage instead. In effect, for the post-publication peer reviewer, it can be a most effective tool of detection. For example, it can allow us to identify the pseudo-academics that are trying to pass off their faulty work as veritable science. It can allow us to detect fraud, duplications, and plagiarism, simply because all the data is accumulated. And it allows the articles of the main publishers to be identified alongside the less famous ones, albeit 10 pages down the search list. So, I can appreciate Beall’s perspective, and I am also extremely concerned about the fact that Google Scholar could be giving the frauds and the pseudo-academics a pulpit from which to preach their fraud and rubbish, but it also gives those in pursuit of justice the perfect tool to catch, and expose, the very same frauds. It is the classical two-edged knife. However, for better or for worse, given its current positive aspects, which trump the negative ones, we would be worse off without Google Scholar. Let the predators use this tool, because it will be useful to bring about their downfall, too, in the long run.

Charles says:

November 13, 2014 at 5:15 AM

@ Google-not:

Totally agree with your perspective. Google scholar is more beneficial to science and academia as a whole than harmful. Although my institution provides access to Web of Science, its hardly ever the starting point of literature search. By comparison, Google scholar is extremely easy to use and is a great tool for conducting searches on topics about which you have little information at the initial stage. Additionally, for lots of researchers in institutions who can’t afford access to WoK/WoS, Google Scholar is an absolute lifesaver. I think researchers out there on a mission to save science from the junk by imposing stricter censorship are just paranoid. Let science and its method speak for itself!

Yamoato Shu says:

November 5, 2014 at 7:47 PM

There are many junk papers in SCI journals as well. Besides, how can you judge a new hypothesis by the one’s current knowledge?

Many Nobel winners did not get acknowledgment in the beginning, even the “good” journals did not accept their manuscripts. After hundred years their thesis then finally get proofed.

Google scholar is not doing anything wrong. If it is not there I assume our daily research progress would back to your slow age – walk 20 minutes to the library, use indexing card to find papers and read 10 papers in a whole day. I cannot go back to that old lifestyle. So I look forward and I face and accept the changes.

If you criticize on Google scholar, you will also criticize on the Internet, the Mobile techs, the Robot, the developing countries, all the new things which are changing our life. I agree that there are junk papers on Google scholar, but I am a researcher, I am a human, I can identify what is good or bad for me. It is not because someone “presents” me so many foods so that I have to eat them all. I can choose. Google is just like a marketplace, it collects and gives you choice, it even sort out a lot for you, what you need it to pick up what you want. This is not wrong with the technology.

I used to read junk papers in the library too. Now I prefer to read more junk papers on Google Scholar, as I get more good papers at the same time.

Google vs Google Scholar says:

November 6, 2014 at 10:11 AM

I think you make an excellent point. The same could also be said about Elsevier’s Scopus, which has started, in the past year or two, to attract several “flies” (aka the predatory OA publishers), to its collection. The fact that they get included on these supposedly prestigious data-bases indicates that their selection systems are highly porous, and unspecific. It also pollutes the data-base to the level that the legitimate journals lose their legitimate status. It is the urgent race to stay ahead of the pack and to beat the competition. Corporations like Reed-Elsevier and Thomson Reuters need to constantly show their share-holders that they are growing and that profits are increasing. When that upward trend drops, expect the downfall of two of publishing’s greatest (not in terms of quality, but in terms of size) establishments. It is their greed that will ultimately be their downfall. Ultimately, it is the pool of scientists who support these publishers (OA or not) or corporations who are to blame. That said, I put Beall’s hypothesis to a test, and considering that Google and Yahoo share similar style of spiders, I used Yahoo as my outlier. I entered the term “medicinal plant micropropagation PDF” (without the parentheses, of course) as my string of key words because I am interested in the tissue culture of medicinal plants and because I wanted to find some free papers on this topic, i.e., open access. On Yahoo, 3 of the 10 top hits were from publishers listed on Beall’s list, and only 1/10 each were from Springer and Elsevier, i.e., the predators trumped the traditional STM publishers. On Google (English, US), the situation was even worse. The very first hit was from a predatory OA journal [1], there were at least another 2 papers from publisher’s on Beall’s list, and another 3-4 PDF files or papers were of suspect quality, including one on ResearchGate, which I am also highly critical of. Only one of the first 10 hits was from a Springer journal. Finally, I checked Google Scholar (English, US), and found that all papers on the top page were from main-stream publishers, primarily Elsevier, Springer ad Wiley. I think this difference is important to note because many scientists do not necessarily use Google Scholar, they use Google. No matter what your opinion is on this topic, the fact that we are having this discussion is important enough.

GrZ says:

November 6, 2014 at 4:12 AM

With all the due respect, scientific publication is increasingly corrupted enterprise from the highest to lowest profile publishers. The ultimate goal of the biggest, richest,…the most “trustful” publishers is money, nothing else.
Except for health repercussion issues, science should be open, free, accessible, publishable, readable, available…to all.
In other word, authors should be able to publish their thoughts, hypothesis, reflections etc. to advance science without the hindrance of the so-called “peer-review”.
Again, peer-review should eventually be required only for papers dealing with ‘major’ or public health issues’, but not for other disciplines where contributions can help advancing knowledge.
The peer-review is becoming a dictatorship wall.
Peer-review is mostly harmful for science. It does more harmful than good.
How would it be acceptable that only 2-3 people (reviewers) out of millions others would determine the suitability or unsuitability of a paper?
If 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,…or 10 reviewers may find a paper unsuitable, there may be other 50, 100, 1000 people who might find it suitable.

Science or knowledge is not exclusive to a few people only and 2-3 reviewers are not a gauge of absolute reliability, otherwise how to explain the fact that many, many papers rejected by a given journal are accepted by another? This is the case of most scientific publications, which illustrate the ridiculous and contradictory character of the scientific publication industry.
If reviewers A, B in journal C have rejected a paper but reviewers X, Y in journal Z have accept it, doesn’t this mean that the peer-review is merely a matter of personal appreciation? It is not more than a subjective process.
People are different, their judgments follow. It is as simple as this.

Darwin, Mendel, Einstein,…etc. were publishing their works without peer-reviews.

Jeffrey Beall says:

November 6, 2014 at 4:40 AM

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

GrZ says:

November 6, 2014 at 4:21 AM

I’d also simply add that many journals have rejected many papers that have been proven to be great papers some years later; a proof that the peer-review process is biased.

Robin P Clarke says:

March 31, 2015 at 3:25 PM

The problem Jeffrey is that you start from the assumption that the whole system of selection of “proper” experts and expertise and so on is actually funtioning validly. There’s huge evidence that that is very far from the case (at least in medical matters), but if you insist on first assuming that it is, then inevitably you end up “proving” it true after all. You are too preoccupied with supposed indicators of genuineness (such as what university) when ultimately there are no really unscammable alternatives to just evaluating the particular document per se. You reckon to categorise some oa journals as “junk” and yet there has been plenty of real junk articles in the supposedly most esteemed journals. As per the words of Dr. Marcia Angell, the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine for 20 years:
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” (NY Review of Books, January 15, 2009)
And I could go on and on with more here.

researchontherocks says:

November 7, 2014 at 11:27 AM

I am a bit confused about the problem the author describes here. Scholar does give you the name of the journal/conference. You might avoid reading the paper if it is not published in so called “reputed” venue. What Google offers is high recall on natural language queries / keywords. It is up to the researcher to filter out the garbage (especially when you define garbage as “non reputed venue”).

Joe says:

November 7, 2014 at 3:47 PM

I do research in a US government agency rather than a university. We undergo a professional peer review every 4 years, at which time the review panel may recommend promotion (increase in civil service grade). I’ve served on review panels, and there is much more attention given to quality than quantity. My impression of the academic setting is different: bureaucratic bean counters just tally number of publications and amount of grants received. With this pressure on academicians to increase the number of their published papers, is it really any surprise that shoddy, pay-to-publish journals exist?

Unless there’s a radical change in the way academicians are evaluated by their universities, the shoddy, unethical, borderline criminal activities of “predatory” publishers are going to thrive.

JW says:

November 8, 2014 at 6:55 AM

Google Scholar indexes almost everything that Web and Science (as well as PubMed, Scopus, etc.) also indexes. So, Web of Science is merely a subset of Google Scholar. Web of Science offers almost nothing meaningful if your aim is to retrieve all relevant literature.

It is true that Google Scholar indexes quite some junk. But who decides what is junk science and what is not? Should this be the job of Google Scholar? The claim that Google Scholar is a “potentially dangerous database for anyone doing serious research” seems invalid to me. Why should Google provide the filter for the serious scientists? Can’t the serious scientists judge for themselves which paper is valid, and which is not? Isn’t this actually the job/obligation of scientists? If scientists want Google Scholar to filter out the junk for them, it means they apparently cannot decide for themselves which papers to include in their literature review.

If your goal is to do a literature review or meta-analysis, then the grey literature (e.g., government reports, conference proceedings, PhD/MSc student theses) need to be retrieved as well, otherwise you are contributing to publication bias. Web of Science misses all of this. People who only rely on Web of Science (PubMed etc) wrongly assume it is sufficient to rely on a subset of the overall scientific enterprise

It should be noted that Google Scholar indexes papers that appear online within a day or three; other indexing services take months or more.

Typhoon says:

November 8, 2014 at 6:18 PM

“Those denying hypotheses that mainstream science has found to be true, such as those denying that global warming is occurring”

Given the current lack of agreement between empirical observations and predictions by GCM simulations, leading to what has been called “global warming pause/hiatus” puzzle of the past 16 years or so, the sensitivity of the climate to CO2 levels is still very much an open question. The “global warming pause” problem is not fringe science, but has been discussed in such mainstream journals such as Nature.

“Those claiming far-fetched cosmological discoveries or theories that are impossible to prove or disprove”

In HEP, string theory has been has yet to make a testable prediction despite some 30 years of intense effort by the best and brightest in the field with a massive number of publications in leading physics journals.

In HEP/astrophysics, the so-far untestable multiverse hypothesis is currently very much in fashion among some leaders in the field

The point is that there are ideas being promoted in mainstream science that it could be argued easily satisfy your fringe criteria.

Google Scholar is a very useful tool for quickly locating papers in a particular field. Even better, it’s a free service. As with any source of information, caveat emptor always applies.

Bob Brown says:

November 14, 2014 at 4:23 PM

According to Aristotle, Galileo and Newton were junk science; according to Newton, Einstein was junk science, according to Einstein, Planck, Schrödinger , and Heisenberg were junk science. Never disparage what you do not understand, simply because your mind and your favorite, feel-good theories cannot explain it. Science peers into the unknown, not the established. Dare to forge ahead, and get out of the comfort zone. There is no such thing as an absurd theory, just as long as no theories get set in stone as to become dogmas.

Kane says:

November 11, 2014 at 3:00 PM

Just wanted to say that Google Scholar’s citation metrics are actually extremely useful for researchers working in certain fields. For example, I am a computer science researcher, focusing on topics such as systems security, web security, malware and program analysis. This is somewhat of an exception within computer science where conference proceedings (with papers typically up to 15-pages in double-column format) are the primary medium for top-tier publications, while journals are often considered easy & cheap targets, essentially graveyards for papers rejected at conferences. When I was a PhD student at a certain top university in Boston, my advisor wouldn’t let me publish in journals at all, he said it would be detrimental to my reputation 🙂 Well, I have to agree he was a bit too opinionated on this, but you get the idea. Some leading conferences in our field include ACM CCS, IEEE S&P, USENIX Security.

The problem is, many of the well-established databases do not index such conference proceedings at all. For instance, I have a high-impact paper published in 2011, cited 102 times so far according to Google Scholar. Going through the list, I can find 5-6 articles that are low-quality theses, or plain junk, but the rest are reputable research papers. When, I search for the same paper in ISI, I get a total of 3 citations listed, all from journals I’ve never heard of. What?

It looks like Google Scholar is the only reliable source of citation counts for security researchers at the moment.

Tyson Adams says:

November 13, 2014 at 2:17 PM

I hadn’t really noticed the problem until recently when someone challenged me to produce combination vaccine safety studies. Searching Google Scholar was no better than the Google search I performed. Most of the top searches were anti-vaxxer nonsense, but Scholar is meant to be better than the algorithms that bring nonsense up the rankings in the main Google search.

dikranmarsupial says:

November 14, 2014 at 7:38 AM

Google scholar gives you the citations for the papers it indexes, which is an indication of a paper’s acceptance by the research community. That is more than sufficient to weed out the junk. If you can’t find papers supporting some idea that are well cited, that is an indication that it is probably not a very good theory.

Marcus O. Muench says:

November 20, 2014 at 11:04 AM

I mostly agree with you that the ranking of returns by Google scholar by citations helps to place the best at the top. However, I have always felt that this also has some downsides. First, any new good papers that have not yet recieved citations may get missed unless one takes the time to limit the search to recent publications. Second, this feeds into a system that once papers get some traction they get all the citations whereas other papers that are just as relevant get ignored. This tends to overlap with the ‘quality’ of the journals in which the papers are published (which is the point of the whole discussion here). Nonetheless, I know many examples of very similar papers, were one was published in a very good journal and the other in a lower-impact journal, were the high impact journal paper gets all the attention. In an ideal world, both papers would be discovered by online searches, read and cited as appropriate. However, this does not always happen. The quality of the journal can be more important than the quality of the work when it comes to recognition, and Google scholars ranking to just adds to this bias.

The only solution that I can think of it just going back to basic good practices as a scientist. Search multiple databases and read as many articles as you can so that your citations are as accurate and inclusive as you can make them. Reviewers should also review the citations for mistakes and omissions.

The troubled publication Scientific World Journal will once again lose its impact factor (this time for 2014), according to one Thomson Reuters website and reports I have received. Web of Science deleted the title (i.e., will no longer index articles) on August 23, 2014.

No mention of any impact factor appears on the journal’s home page, here: http://www.hindawi.com/journals/tswj/

Also, a Thomson Reuters website entitled “Thomson Reuters Master Journal List JOURNAL COVERAGE CHANGES (for the past 12 months)” generates the result shown in the image above when the journal’s title is searched. The result says, “Dropped.” No reason is given. That website is here.

Soon after Hindawi Publishing Corporation purchased this journal in 2012, Thomson Reuters suppressed the journal’s 2011 impact factor due to an “anomalous citation pattern” that occurred apparently before Hindawi purchased the journal from its previous owner but reported impact factors for both 2012 and 2013 and, oddly, 5 year impact factors, all of which include 2011 data.

I reported on this impact factor suppression here.

I also learned that these two Hindawi journals have also been dropped by Thomson Reuters
o Abstract and Applied Analysis
o Journal of Applied Mathematics

The situation for these two journals is the same as it is with the Scientific World Journal. There is no mention of any impact factor on the journal’s website, Thomson Reuters reports the journals have been dropped, but Journal Citation Reports will continue to show an impact factor for both titles through 2013.

An inquiry sent to Thomson Reuters received this response regarding the three journals:

“In this situation, two of our editors noticed abnormal citation patterns between these three journals and a rapid decline of journal quality. They determined that these should be removed as quickly as possible from the Web of Science to preserve our reputation for quality and maintain the trust of the research community.”

Intensive Spamming

Hindawi Publishing Corporation is currently involved in an intensive spamming campaign. Scholars from all over the world have been forwarding me spam emails they have recently received from Hindawi, and I personally received a spam email requesting that I submit a paper to their highly focused Geography Journal. I am an academic librarian and don’t have a formal background in Geography.

On its website, Hindawi reports that it “is a rapidly growing academic publisher with 434 peer-reviewed, open access journals covering a wide range of academic disciplines.” Perhaps it is growing too quickly.

Conclusion

I have also heard about a questionable article that appears in Hindawi’s Journal of Lipids. The article is entitled “Why Fish Oil Fails: A Comprehensive 21st Century Lipids-Based Physiologic Analysis.”

Finally, here is a blog post by ravingscientist01 that reports on a questionable article published in Hindawi’s journal Biomed Research International.

UPDATE 2014-10-15: Response from Hindawi Publishing corporation:

My name is Paul Peters and I am the Chief Strategy Officer for Hindawi. It is indeed true that three of Hindawi’s journals (“The Scientific World Journal,” “Abstract and Applied Analysis,” and “Journal of Applied Mathematics”) were deselected for coverage in the Science Citation Index Expanded on September 15. As soon as the deselection of these journals was announced, Hindawi contacted the authors and editors of these journals to inform them of this decision and updated the journal websites accordingly. Hindawi fully acknowledges that Thomson Reuters has the editorial freedom to determine which journals are included in its databases, however I would like to respond to the two specific points of concern that were mentioned in this blog post.

I would first like to respond to the issue of citation stacking between these three journals. Prior to the release of the most recent Journal Citation Reports (JCR) in July 2014, Thomson Reuters conducted a full analysis of self-citations and citation stacking, which resulted in the suppression of 38 journals from the most recent JCR. None of the three deselected journals from Hindawi were included in this list of suppressed journals. In addition, Hindawi has analyzed the citations that each of these three journals have received within Web of Science so far in 2014 and found the following results:

– The Scientific World Journal has received a total of 3,627 citations in 2014, of which there are 19 citations from Abstract and Applied Analysis and 11 citations from the Journal of Applied Mathematics. – Abstract and Applied Analysis has received a total of 2,356 citations in 2014, of which there are 86 citations from The Scientific World Journal and 79 citations from Journal of Applied Mathematics. – Journal of Applied Mathematics has received a total of 870 citations in 2014, of which there are 43 citations from The Scientific World Journal and 122 from Abstract and Applied Analysis.

I would also like to respond to the issue of declining quality in these three journals. The most straightforward quality metric to look at in judging the quality of these journals is the Impact Factor for each of these titles. While there are limitations to what the Impact Factor can measure, it is a useful metric for comparing the citation impact of content published in journals that are within a particular subject category.

Abstract and Applied Analysis’ Impact Factor ranks the journal as number 22 out of 299 journals in the Mathematics subject category in the most recent Journal Citation Reports, which places it among the top 10% of all math journals in the Web of Science. The Impact Factor for the Journal of Applied Mathematics is roughly at the mid-point of the Applied Mathematics subject category (number 130 out of 250 total journals) in the most recent JCR. Finally, The Scientific World Journal’s Impact Factor places it in the top third of all journals (16 out of 55 journals) in the Multidisciplinary Sciences subject category.

If self-citations are excluded from the Impact Factor calculations of all journals, Abstract and Applied Analysis would be ranked number 49 out of 299 journals in Mathematics, the Journal of Applied Mathematics would be ranked number 154 out of 250 journals in Applied Mathematics, and The Scientific World Journal would be ranked number 14 out of 55 journals in Multidisciplinary Sciences.

Hindawi understands that for many authors it is important for these journals to be indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded so that publications in these journals can be considered in research assessment exercises as well as tenure and promotion reviews. Hindawi will continue working with Thomson Reuters in order to respond to any concerns that they may have in the hope that these journals will be considered for inclusion in the Science Citation Index Expanded in the future

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

Comments:

Siddiq Ali Chishti Lecturer FIS says:

October 14, 2014 at 9:16 AM

Dear Jeffrey Beall, Hope you will be doing fine. I just wanted your favor regarding knowing the academic status of a journal named ” European Journal of Social Sciences”. I intend to submit my article to them but first I need your opinion about their status. I shall be thankful to you for your cooperation. Kind regards, Siddiq Ali

Jeffrey Beall says:

October 14, 2014 at 9:23 AM

I strongly recommend that you not submit your paper to that journal. It is a counterfeit publisher.

oannis says:

September 3, 2015 at 1:10 AM

Hi there!

How it can be European when it is based in Seychelles?

Just for the record, Seychelles is in the Indian Ocean…

M. Salmani says:

October 14, 2014 at 11:07 AM

I am curious to know why don’t you add Hindawi publisher to your list and if that is that case, why to you refrain to add your famous sentence “I strongly recommend against submitting scholarly papers to all XXX journals published by XXX ” to the conclusion in this post? We would appreciate if you could clarify or elaborate on it.

Wojciech says:

October 14, 2014 at 11:36 AM

Dear Sir. I think that you must add now Hindawi in your Predatory Publishers. Their journals do not have peer review. They demand a lot of USD for publishing an article. Their journals do not have Editor-in-Chief. They have published some ridiculous non-scientific papers. You must be fair and honest. Add them in the predatory publishers list. I dare you. Otherwise, you are not fair and you give advantages to Hindawi against MDPI and SCIRP that are like Hindawi but blacklisted by you

Dave Langers says:

October 14, 2014 at 1:57 PM

I’ve done some reviewing for “Neural Plasticity”, from Hindawi. I was suspicious, but did not encounter anything out of the ordinary. Quite a good paper, if I remember correctly, and I find the journal content entirely legit.
I realise this is N=1, but this particular journal does /not/ seem to belong on the crap pile. No idea about any of the other Hindawi journals, although I can imagine that the quality “diverges” from case to case.
Based on my experience, I do not recommend a phrase like “I strongly recommend against submitting scholarly papers to all XXX journals published by XXX”, as suggested above.
(Disclosure: apart having done one review for them, I have no link with this journal of publisher whatsoever.)

A. Boucherif says:

February 20, 2015 at 5:53 AM

ISI indexing is a business making money on the back of scientists. Every Hindawi Math. Journal has an editor-in-chief and the review process is as clean as any other math. journal. There are ridiculous paper in every journal. Many US and European journal are rejecting papers on a geographical basis without review process. I believe the scientific community should go for google scholar indexing and scopus.

Marriam says:

October 17, 2014 at 9:28 AM

Dear Jeffrey Beall
Please do some favour by clear the present situation regarding present impact factor of Scientific World Journal. The name of the is there in Journal Citation Reports 2013, which will be valid un-till next Journal Citation Reports, likely to be published in july 2015. Does this mean it has still impact factor but will lose in next Journal Citation Reports?

Jeffrey Beall says:

October 17, 2014 at 10:21 AM

Yes, I think it does.

PK says:

October 18, 2014 at 7:53 AM

Should reputed journals such as Science accept full page color ads from Hindwai? Almost every issue of Science includes a full page ad promoting their publications

CSSE – not! says:

October 18, 2014 at 1:53 PM

I agree that Hindawi should be added to Beall’s list, for one simple reason, they treat science like a cattle market. Although the e-mail dated October 17, 2014 was in fact addressed to me (using automatic mail spoolers to cover up the spamming nature), notice the “negotiation” of the removal of all publishing fees if I submitted within 14 days. Which scientist can produce a paper within 14 days, I ask?

“On Tuesday, September 30, 2014 12:07 PM, International Journal of Genomics wrote:

Dear Dr. Teixeira Da Silva,

It is my pleasure to invite you to submit an invited contribution to International Journal of Genomics (formerly titled Comparative and Functional Genomics), which is a peer-reviewed, open access journal that publishes original research articles as well as review articles dealing with the post-sequencing phases of genome analysis. The most recent Impact Factor for International Journal of Genomics is 1.747 according to 2013 Journal Citation Reports released by Thomson Reuters (ISI) in mid 2014.

International Journal of Genomics is published using an open access publication model, meaning that all interested readers are able to freely access the journal online at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijg/ without the need for a subscription, and authors retain the copyright of their work. Moreover, all published articles will be made available on PubMed Central and indexed in PubMed at the time of publication.

The journal has a distinguished Editorial Board with extensive academic qualifications, ensuring that the journal maintains high scientific standards and has a broad international coverage. A current list of the journal’s editors can be found at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijg/editors/.

Publishing an article in International Journal of Genomics requires Article Processing Charges of $1,500. However, if you can send your paper to me directly by email before the end of October 2014, I will be happy to waive the Article Processing Charges for this invited contribution.

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

Best regards,

Monica Toma
——————————–
Monica Toma
Editorial Office
International Journal of Genomics
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
http://www.hindawi.com”

Science publishing has become a disgrace.

Wim Crusio says:

October 18, 2014 at 12:08 PM

I am a but puzzled by Thomson Reuters” policies. This journal has in 2013 5% self cites to years that are used in the 2013 IF calculation (2011 and 2012). A journal like Rejuvenation Research has over 40% (and almost no self-cites to years that are not important for the IF calculation…) and has had such high rates for years (sometimes even higher). Why is TSWJ fropped, but RR kept?

chawla says:

October 18, 2014 at 9:51 PM

I have noted that many journals in the past are dropped from “Science Citation Index Expanded”, but after some time they reactivated again.
http://admin-apps.webofknowledge.com/JCR/JCR?RQ=RECORD&rank=16&journal=SCI+WORLD+J
TSWJ is still on web of knowledge “Thomoson Reuters’s impact factor list”. In above link it has still impact factor 1.219. It may be reactivted again before the new impact factor list, which normally published in July each year. So it is not confirmed, it will lose its impact factor.

Jeffrey Beall says:

October 19, 2014 at 8:16 AM

I think it’s confirmed that it will not have an impact factor for 2014.

Hasib Khan says:

November 13, 2014 at 8:48 AM

Dear Jeffery Beall
What will be the position of the papers which have accepted before September 2014? Those papers will have the impact factor or they also lost their impact factor?

Jeffrey Beall says:

November 13, 2014 at 11:31 AM

Actually, papers don’t have impact factors. Only journals have impact factors. But I think it’s safe to say that the papers were published when the journal had an impact factor.

A says:

October 19, 2014 at 8:48 AM

Dear Jeffrey Beall
I am a Ph.D scholar from Pakistan. I have a research Article in The Scientific World Journal. There should be one research article of non-zero impact factor for the submission of Ph.D thesis in Pakistan. May I submit my thesis on the basis of above mentioned article before July 2015. Please reply, its a matter of huge concern for me.

Jeffrey Beall says:

October 19, 2014 at 9:22 AM

Of course, you are free to do whatever you choose.

The journal currently has a 2013 impact factor. My understanding is that it will not have a 2014 impact factor, and Thomson Reuters currently lists it as “dropped.”

A says:

October 19, 2014 at 9:29 AM

So I can submit my Thesis before 2014 or not. They demand 1 paper in a journal having impact factor. Now a days 2013 list is valid, in which it has impact factor.

J.J. says:

October 20, 2014 at 7:26 AM

@A The only people who can help you with this issue are the member of your thesis committee, ask them. Random strangers on the internet have no idea what will help you graduate.

As a side note, regardless of grad school requirement, a publication in this journal will probably not be highly regarded in future academic applications.

JBL says:

October 19, 2014 at 3:21 PM

Obviously you should discuss with your Ph.D. advisor and the chair of your department if you want to know what your departmental policies are.

IF – stop! says:

October 23, 2014 at 1:39 AM

And while following all the pleasant advice about speaking to your advisors, may I also suggest that you contact the Pakistani higher education authorities to stop using the IF as an equivalent of quality and to assess PhDs. When wll this pathetic game and dependence on the IF stop? It has corrupted science. No longer do students talk about the quality of their work, they just want to know about the IF of the journal it is published in. Young scientists must seek a novel way to step out of this very sick state science is in. The sooner we lose the IF, the better.

Riaz Uddin says:

October 19, 2014 at 7:22 PM

I was very optimistic about this publisher. Anyway, today I found one of the articles published in Advances in Public Health, a Hindawi journal which has only one author. Well its not unlikely and an article published by a single author is not a crime! But the nature of the study somehow demands more than one author. Let me explain: the author acknowledged this way “This study was carried out as the partial fulfillment of the degree of Masters in Public Health, UniSA School of Public Health and Life Sciences, University of South Asia.” So, either the author is the student or the supervisor. So, there should have been at least 2 authors.

Moreover, though the work was carried out for the purpose of a degree awarding the author used different affiliations. This is so confusing.

Here is the article: http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aph/2014/952832/

Do you have any comments? Do you think it as a scientific misconduct or do you think the editorial office of the publisher is ignoring something?

Thanks!

Jeffrey Beall says:

October 20, 2014 at 8:39 AM

Based on your description, I see no evidence of misconduct.

wimcrusio says:

October 20, 2014 at 9:00 AM

This is not unprecedented. My own thesis adviser once had a master’s student who wished to publish his results. My adviser was not sure of the data, so declined to be an author, but did permit the student to publish his master’s thesis work. The student became a successful researcher (but told me once that he’d never succeeded in replicating his master’s thesis work, so my advisor was right after all :-).

Kingsley N. Ukwaja says:

October 22, 2014 at 6:25 AM

Dear Beall,

After many years of following your work and visiting your site, I felt compelled to thank you for the great work you are doing and for helping the academic/scientific community.

I wish to drop a few lines about HINDAWI publisher. I believe the journals operated by this publisher are all legit. Agreed, they try to create additional journal titles almost on quarterly bases, they list the names of their journal editors (although no editor in chief) in their websites with their affiliation and recent works as indexed in scopus.

I am not sure why the TSWJ was listed as dropped in the JCR…But I have had three experiences with submitting three manuscripts in three different journals in HINDAWI publisher.

My first paper, submitted to one of their newer titles (in PubMEd, but not listed in JCR yet) was rejected. Three reviewers reviewed the work (the recommendations were minor revision, major revision, and rejection), respectively; but for unclear reasons the editor rejected the paper. I used the advice given by the reviewers to make changes and resubmitted to a journal (indexed in JCR and PubMed) with a different publisher (two recommendations were minor revisions) before the paper was accepted.

Since then, I have submitted two additional papers to two different HINDAWI-operated journals. Each was reviewed by at least two reviewers and went through two rounds of review before the papers were accepted.

Furthermore, compared to other open access publishers, I believe HINDAWI publishers appears to be the most friendly to the research community. Except for the month of October 2014, Since the beginning of this year, the publisher has had several offerings of article processing charge (APC) waivers for manuscripts submitted in some of their journals. Within the month the APC waivers were being offered, all manuscripts irrespective of country of origin submitted to the journal that were finally accepted are published free of charge.

Indeed, for my two manuscripts which were published this year (one published, the other in press) by journals operated by HINDAWI, I was not charged any APCs because I took advantage of the APC waivers offered by the journals (presently, the APCs for the journals are $600 and $800).

With my above experience, although I believe some of their titles are not yet perfect, I still think that the journal policies of HINDAWI publishers does not yet warrant inclusion in your list.

For the records, the above are just my experiences with this publisher.

Thank you once again Prof Beall.

Farzad says:

October 30, 2014 at 3:45 AM

The way that The scientific world journal is treated by Thomson Reuters is grotesque and suggests some prejudice which may have played a part in their decision. There is no doubt that Hindawi publication has a long way to go to reach the quality and reputation of some other publishers like Elsevier or Springer. However, it can not be denied that Hindawi is a rising new power in the academic community, which to some extent, challenges veteran publishers. We know that the margin profit of Hindawi surpassed that of Elsevier some time ago. I am not interested in putting forward some conspiracy theories and claim that those long-established and influential publishers may try to perniciously impact Hindawi through the tools such as Thomson Reuters, but excuse of self-citation provided by Thomson Reuters for removing The scientific world journal or Abstract and Applied Analysis from their list sounds not only unconvincing but rather flimsy. Ironically, if self-citation is going to establish a criterion for preserving or tarnishing reputation of Thomson Reuters or scientific community , then, many Elsevier or Springer-operated journals must either be dropped from JCR or lose their impact factor.

phpkelli says:

November 10, 2014 at 5:56 AM

This is really sad and if things keep going into the dark like this then soon the whole academic sector will die. I am disappointed in reading this and on the other hand I am glad that there are Journals like http://www.elkjournals.com/ who are working so hard to come up with new ways to help researchers and scholars. I recently got my journal paper submitted with them through their easy and quick publication process. Since I was left with very few days.

BioMed Research is a brand-new open-access publisher based in India that recently launched with 21 open-access journals. The publisher copies the look, feel — and even the tagline — of the established OA publisher BioMed Central.

This new publisher has a single, six-member editorial board for all 21 of its low-quality journals, and it promises a fast peer review process:

We Review the Manuscript under Fast Track System and time taken from submission to online publication is Less Than 10 Days!

Most of the new publisher’s journals have article content, but it is lifted from other publishers. For example, the article “Bioactive Potential of Seagrass Extracts against Dengue Fever Mosquito” appears in BioMed Research’s journal called BMR Parasitology, but most of the content appears to be lifted from the article “Bioactivity of seagrass against the dengue fever mosquito Aedes aegypti larvae” that originally appeared in the Asian Pacific Journal of Tropical Biomedicine, a journal published by Elsevier.

The publisher claims to be based in Kanpur Nagar, Uttar Pradesh, India. The table below, copied from the website, shows the article processing charges for Indians and for “foreigner authors.”

This is clearly a junk publisher, and I am sure that the vast majority of researchers will have the scholarly publishing literacy skills necessary to be able to recognize and avoid this as a predatory publisher. Let’s hope it quickly withers and dies.

Appendix: List of BioMed Research Journals as of 2014-09-01:
1.BMR Antioxidants & Redox Biology
2.BMR Biochemistry
3.BMR Bioinformatics & Cheminformatics
4.BMR Biology
5.BMR Biotechnology
6.BMR Cancer Research
7.BMR Cellular and Molecular Biology
8.BMR Complementary and Alternative Medicine
9.BMR Food & Nutrition Research
10.BMR Gene and Genome Biology
11.BMR Medicinal Chemistry Research
12.BMR Medicine
13.BMR Microbiology
14.BMR Parasitology
15.BMR Phytomedicine
16.BMR Toxicology
17.International Journal of Engineering & Scientific Research
18.International Journal of Ethnobiology & Ethnomedicine
19.International Journal of Pharmacy & Bio-Sciences
20.Journal of Plant & Agriculture Research
21.Pharmacology & Toxicology Research

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

Comments:

J.J. says:

September 15, 2014 at 9:05 AM

The geographical difference in APC make the scheme obvious. This ‘company’ (most likely a sole individual) is selling a fake international recognition to Indian scholars.

The APC is ridiculous for international authors, there is no way 50$/article is going to cover the costs of a legitimate OA publishing operation. This is just to attract papers from people outside India to mimic legitimate journals.

It is then hoped by the creator of this operation that unscrupulous Indian scholars will buy themselves publications in such fake journals hoping it will help them to get a cosy government position.

The Indian government/political system is not mine to judge, but the issue here is that readers might be tricked into thinking the content is actual science.

We, as scientists, should be very careful: fake science is hurting the reputation of legitimate scientists.

Hyderabad, India-based OMICS Publishing Group is among the most abusive of the scholarly publishers classified as “predatory publishers.” One of the ways it rips off researchers is by spamming them without mentioning the article processing charges.

Occasionally, researchers respond to the spam emails by submitting a manuscript, which is quickly accepted, with a quick and trivial peer review. Soon afterwards, the authors are surprised by a hefty and unexpected invoice, often for $2,700.

Below are three emails I received recently that document three cases of this abuse. The third example is an email exchange between the duped author and “Joseph Marreddy,” a contrived name used by someone at OMICS Publishing Group, followed by a summary email sent to me.

Example 1

Hi Jeff,

I stumbled onto your blog recently as I was looking at the omics group. I am sad to say that I was one of those researchers duped by the omics group. My boss, a prominent doctor was invited by omics group to submit some articles. We did so, not realizing how bad it was, but after we submitted, they gave us an invoice charging us for it, even thought they invited us to submit articles, with a tight deadline no less! Now we seem to be stuck. We have not approved the final proof, and we specifically told them we want to withdraw the article, but they are not letting us do that, as they had already assigned a DOI for the paper. I have tried to contact them about this, but to no avail, and they always seem to give me the runaround. Is there any recourse for poor victims like me? What would you suggest we do?

Thank you for your kind attention.

Number 2

Hello

I live in France and I’m sorry if my English is not very clear.

I write to you because OMICS contacted me last year for submitting and publish an article in the Journal of Medical Diagnostic. In their email, they were talking about special issues and did not mention fee publication. However, I submitted an article. After a review, they ask me to modify a little article (not a lot) then send me authorproof this month. And I discovered fee publication, which were not mentionned in their first email. Fee are about 919 dollars. When I told them that I can not pay because I am still a student, they proposed me 500 dollars, and they say that it can not be lower (it’s the minimal) and show me by internet link intructions for authors mentionning fee publication of 900 dollars.

I read an article on web about predatory scholary open-access publishers written by you. I didn’t know that it can exist until now.

OMICS is now asking me to pay. But before they publish it I said when I receive authorproof that I didn’t wish to publish in their journal but even, they publish it. However, they didn’t send any examplary of the review and when I asked for when I can see the article, I wonder if it is a false view of the page or not (http://www.omicsgroup.org/journals/ArchiveJMDM/articleinpress-medical-diagnostic-methods-open-access.php).

Can you help me? I am French so I don’t know the law in USA, I don’t know what to do and i am very afraid that they ask me for more money.

The OMICS contact is:
Mr Joseph G Marreddy
Journal of Medical Diagnostic Methods.
731 Gull Ave, Foster City
CA 94404, USA
Phone: +1- 650-268-9744
Fax: +1-650-618-1414
Toll Free: +1-800-216-6499
Please can you help me? i would be very grateful

Number 3

This is a series of emails between OMICS and an author who submitted a manuscript in response to an OMICS spam email, followed by an email to me:

From: OMICS Group Inc., [authorproof-openaccess@omicsonline.org]
Sent: Friday, 27 June 2014 11:15 PM
To: [Redacted]
Subject: [Redacted]_Author proof & Invoice

Manuscript Details:

Reference number: [Redacted]
Journal Title: Journal of Antivirals & Antiretrovirals
Title: [Redacted]
Corresponding Author: Dr. [Redacted]

Dear Dr. [Redacted],

Herewith we are sending the Author proof & Invoice of [Redacted]. Check the proof carefully and return within 48 hours. Please arrange to make the payment within two weeks. Correct the misprints and send back to the editorial staff by e-mail to authorproof-openaccess@omicsonline.org or FAX to +1-650-618-1414

Only necessary typographical errors should be corrected, no new additions should be made. Extensive changes will request a new approval of the editorial committee. They will be inserted as notes added in the Proof. If you have corrections, please write them in the author’s proof directly with marking and send it.

Or Please fill in a character with an intelligible character or type, scan and send it by e-mail.

Or Type the misprints in separate word file with two columns, one is for misprinted and one is for to be print and send by e-mail.

Author will be charged for any expenses incurred by the publisher for making extensive corrections or additions.

* If you fail to send the corrections within 48 hours, we may assume that you agreed to publish without corrections.

We request you to carefully check the PDF file.

Please inform us if you need any reprints of your article.

The cost of reprints on acid free papers:
1000 reprints: 719$
500 reprints: 519$
100-200 reprints: 419$
Shipping cost: 50$ with in USA
100$ outside USA
Dispatch time: 10-15 working days

OMICS Group successfully running 300 Open Access journals and 100 more scientific conferences (per year) in different disciplines with the support from 30,000 well qualified editorial board members. We are the proud partner in making healthcare and scientific information Open Access.

If you need more information, please do not hesitate to contact us.

On behalf of Journal of Antivirals & Antiretrovirals ,

With best regards for your ongoing research.

Joseph Marreddy
Journal of Antivirals & Antiretrovirals ,
731 Gull Ave, Foster City
CA 94404, USA
Phone: +1- 650-268-9744
Fax: +1-650-618-1414
Toll Free: +1-800-216-6499

________________________________________

—–Original Message—–
From: [Redacted]
Sent: Sunday, June 29, 2014 5:17 PM
To: OMICS Group Inc.,
Subject: RE: [Redacted]_Authorproof & Invoice
Dear Mr Mareddy,

Thank you for this however I must admit to being completely taken aback regarding the invoice. This was a solicited review and it was never mentioned that a cost would be incurred to me or my fellow authors for publication. I am not in a position to pay this sum and am considering withdrawing the article from JAA.

Please do NOT assume that I agree to publication without correction as I do not.

I have been in touch with the editorial assistant who originally invited me to write the review, Gracia, but have not yet heard back from her.

If I do not hear within the next 48 hours that the fee will not be charged I shall have to withdraw my submission.

Kind regards,

[Redacted]
From: OMICS Group Inc., [authorproof-openaccess@omicsonline.org]
Sent: Tuesday, 8 July 2014 11:05 PM
To: [Redacted]
Subject: RE: [Redacted]_Regarding manuscript

Dear Dr. [Redacted],

Warm greetings!!

Initially sorry for the inconvenience caused.

Mam, we initially inform you we cannot let you withdraw the manuscript as it published online and more over assigned with DIO number. We would like to inform you that article processing charges are mentioned in the homepage of our website and also in Instructions for authors. kindly follow the link “http://omicsonline.org/index.php”

http://omicsonline.org/instructionsforauthors-antivirals-antiretrovirals-open-access.php”

However considering your mail as special we would like to provide discount on publication fee. we provide you 20% discount on fee. now you are asked to pay 2179$ as fee.

Hope the amendment made will satisfy you and will support us by paying the fee. Mam, as you are aware of the fact that ours is an Open Access and does not receive any kind of financial support. As we solely depend upon gracious contributions made from generous authors like you. we request kindly support us by paying the fee.

We look forward to receive an positive reply .

If you need more information, please do not hesitate to contact us.

On behalf of Journal of Antivirals & Antiretrovirals ,

With best regards for your ongoing research.

Joseph Marreddy
Journal of Antivirals & Antiretrovirals ,
731 Gull Ave, Foster City
CA 94404, USA
Phone: +1- 650-268-9744
Fax: +1-650-618-1414
Toll Free: +1-800-216-6499

From: [Redacted]
Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2014 12:33 AM
To: Beall, Jeffrey
Subject: OMICS group invoice.
FW: [Redacted] Regarding manuscript

Dear Jeffrey,

I am a [Redacted] researcher from [Redacted].

I recently received an invitation to write an article for the “Journal of antivirals and antiretrovirals” from OMICS group. I googled Omics but unfortunately at that time, did not look far enough down the page beyond their website etc to see other negative things that have been written about them.

In the original invitation from an “editorial assistant” there was no mention of a fee but there was a link to the website which they said would provide more details. I did not at the time follow it. Looking at it now on the website there is one tab with one heading (author instructions) in which the fees are mentioned.

The editorial assistant said I could just email her the article which I did. I did not go through an online submission process or sign a copyright agreement.

The article was accepted within about 5 weeks with a 4 line peer review which was largely just technical.

A few days later the proofs were sent me along with the invoice for $2700!

I sent them an email saying I was not in a position to pay the sum and that it had been an invited review, the fees never mentioned etc and that if I did not hear from them in 48 hours I would be withdrawing my article. There was no response in 48 hours so I sent an email saying I withdrew my article and I planned to submit it elsewhere, that I had never signed a copyright and they did not have any authority over the manuscript, I will forward that email separately. I received a response 1 week later, below, although it replied to the second last email I had sent.

I have checked the Journal of Antivirals and antiretrovirals website and the article is not published online including under “articles in press”.

I do not want to pay the money and ideally I would like to submit my article to another, reputable journal.

I realize I have been terribly naive and that you may not be in a position to offer any advice, but if you have any experience, in particular with what has ensued in such cases I would be grateful for it.

Best Wishes,

[Redacted]

One of the significant things about this last exchange is that publishers claims that the paper cannot be withdrawn because it already has a DOI (digital object identifier, which it calls DIO). This is completely bogus, as the assignment of a DOI does not mean that an article cannot be withdrawn. In fact, articles with DOIs are withdrawn and retracted regularly. This is just a trick to manipulate the researchers and pressure them to pay.

In the strongest possible terms, I advise all researchers to avoid submitting any manuscripts to all of OMICS Publishing Group’s journals and cut off any contact you have with this publisher. As the evidence here shows, this is an abusive publisher that exploits honest researchers.

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

Comments:

Farid says:

August 7, 2014 at 9:37 AM

My Friend from Iran who often travels between Iran and US was another victim of this predatory journal. His student received an acceptance letter and bill on a joint paper and OMICS group managed to find his mobile number asking for the bill payment. They were also ready for discount and any price negotiation, my friend said. Eventually, my friend simply ignored their calls and messages and they were left with no payment. I think if anyone treats them like this, they may stop doing business like this and tarnishing growing OA business.

ED says:

August 7, 2014 at 10:34 AM

Appropriately, according to his likely fake LinkedIn profile, Joseph G. is the ?”Fianace Executive at OMICS Group Incorporation”.

Ole, Ole! says:

August 7, 2014 at 11:51 AM

Is it not possible to try and get this Joseph Marreddy arrested? There seems to be enough evidence on this page alone showing that he is scamming scientists. His address lists in California, but is he really in Hyderabad? The other thing I noticed among this truly scandalous greedy, non-academic “publisher”, was the clear omission of a very important adjective (in square parentheses): “with the support from 30,000 well qualified [unpaid] editorial board members”. ONe way to sink this boat would be to get the 30,000 editors to resign.

Dan Riley says:

August 7, 2014 at 1:38 PM

Undisclosed fees are generally unenforceable (in common law terms, there’s no contract), though of course the details will vary by jurisdiction. If you are a victim of a predatory publisher and are associated with an institution with legal staff, talk to them.

The OMICS group business model is similar to patent trolls and ambulance chasers, in that they depend on people being willing to settle.

Yehuda says:

August 7, 2014 at 8:06 PM

I receive unsolicited e-mails from open-access journal publishers on a regular basis. I routinely delete all messages listed on this site. This has saved me from the annoyances discussed in this thread.

Life Science Journal has been prospectively delisted from Scopus.

I received a confirmation that Life Science Journal — published jointly by Marsland Press and Zhengzhou University — has been prospectively delisted from the Scopus database. The reasons for the delisting were not stated in the confirmation, but it’s easy to find problems with this journal.

On its website, the journal claims to have an impact factor of 0.165, and this claim is confirmed; the journal’s 2012 impact factor is indeed 0.165. What will its 2013 impact factor be, when the new impact factor data is released soon? [Update, 2014-07-30: This journal has lost its impact factor. ]

The impact factor might explain this journal’s large number of issues and articles. Formerly a quarterly, the journal now publishes monthly, and it publishes many articles per issue.

The journal is currently publishing volume 11 (2014) [see above]. Volume 11 number 1 has 60 articles in it!

Additionally, the journal is publishing 12 special issues in 2014, in addition to the 12 regular issues.

We’ve seen this before — a journal gets an impact factor and then goes crazy, accepting as many articles as possible to earn more money.

The article processing charge per article is US $640. Somebody is making a lot of easy money here. Also, judging from the articles, no copyediting is being done, as it appears the articles are being published as they are received.

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

RMS says:

July 22, 2014 at 10:28 AM

Browsing through an issue I notice a major problem: the journal accepts articles of any topic, everything ranging from environmental science, to civil engineering, to military history… Do these titles sound like “life science”?

1-) “General V. Anders’ Polish Army in Central Asia”
2-) “Strengthing [sic] Steel Frames by Using Post Tensioned Cable”
3-) “Mechanics of Bond Behaviour at the Joint of Normal Strength Concrete Intersecting Beam”
4-) “Uranium content measurement in drinking water for Some region in Sudan using Laser Flourometry Technique”

Jeffrey Beall says:

July 22, 2014 at 10:35 AM

Excellent observation! Thank you. No, these do not sound like life sciences articles to me.

Bull’s eye says:

July 22, 2014 at 11:02 AM

Notice how papers just “disappear”. For example, paper No. 15, in volume 11, No. 10 (2014):
http://www.lifesciencesite.com/lsj/life1110/
A paper is supposed to be there with pages 89-97, which suggests that this could have been a duplicate paper, or maybe some other issue. However, the lack of any trace of what was published goes against the scholarly principles of retractions as advocated by COPE. Marsland Press is one of the worst plagues in OA publishing, in my opinion, and one of the most concerning aspects in many of its journals are these “disappearing acts” of papers: one day there, the next gone.

Damien says:

July 22, 2014 at 10:40 AM

See the special issue http://www.lifesciencesite.com/lsj/life1106s. there is a paper on “Budgeting of police in the context of “crime cost”, a paper on “Corporate culture and socio-psychological climate of the organization”, a paper on “Trade legislation problems of the Moscow city”; and so on.
LSJ become ” the world journal of everything”!!!

P Canning says:

July 23, 2014 at 6:03 AM

open access publishing is NOT beneficial for anyone especially authors. it is just a money making scheme for some individuals and groups…just like Nigerian scams. good luck to people who publish in open access journals, as for me i will stick with the tried and tested publishers like Elsevier, Springer, Taylor and Francis etc. I applaud Mr. Reall for doing such a commendable work.

Farid says:

July 23, 2014 at 8:21 AM

P Canning

I think scientific community must represent their concern about so called predatory journals whether they are OA or not and help people in Scopus and ISI get rid of them. This way we have better chance to select good quality journals no matter they are OA or not. These days, it is easy to find predatory journals from OA and not OA whether they are published by a well known publisher or by a newly greedy guy.

AReader says:

July 27, 2014 at 5:06 AM

I would argue that Nature is a predatory journal trading on its high impact factor to publish large amounts of nonsense. And if you don’t believe me, try reading Nature from even five years ago and see how many articles were later shown to be false or at least unlikely to be true.

The problem is not open-source. The problem is the academic star system that forces people to produce articles, any articles, in order to keep their funding and jobs. Thus the incentives to publish outweigh caution over

This state of affairs has broken the peer review system, buried perfectly good science and unjustifiably promoted bad. And the stench is starting to be noticed by the taxpayers, the people ultimately funding this vicious circle.

At the end of this is the predatory journal, making money from publishing without sufficient damnation.

Obinna says:

August 2, 2014 at 8:14 AM

Dear Scholars,
Would this journal as well as publisher be classified to be of Asian origin and predatory? If yes, what were the criteria used to index it scopus in the first place? And why? Why is there no clear reason stated for delisting the journal? I encountered a similar scenario with web of science concerning two nigeria-based medical journals that were delisted without any clear reason given. I then asked thomson reuters for the reason behind their exclusion from their database and they responded by saying that it was as a result of low citation rate and some other reasons. Please, some other what exactly??? The current trend raises the question of bias towards third world publishing efforts by first world establishments. In the traditional publishing era, authors from developing regions were passive contributors and active consumers of scientific literature. But in the OA publishing era, they have become active participants and contributors to the global scientific literature. All of a sudden, the scientific publishing atmosphere is now polluted, why is this so????

Mobilea says:

August 2, 2014 at 12:06 PM

Dear Obinna: I totally agree with you. Delisting from Scopus mush have a strong reasons, not only someone’s desire to dampen the journal.
Mobilea