Scholarly Open Access

We call for your author fees.

Thanks to tips sent in by scientists and researchers, I learn about several new questionable publishers and independent journals each week. In this blog post, I highlight three questionable publishers that I recently learned about and added to my list.

1. Today Science purports to be owned by a bogus organization called the Science and Education Centre of North America. This center was probably established (if it even actually exists) to help make the publisher look more legitimate.

Today Science publishes four journals: International Education Research, Agricultural Science, Global Review of Economics, and Journal of Business and Management. Two of these titles are unoriginal and currently in use by other journals. The publisher is headquartered at 2050 Bridletowne Circle in Toronto, Ontario, which is a high-rise condominium.

One of the rotating images on the sites main page un-idiomatically declares, “We call for papers.” Most of the editorial board members are from Asia, and only a couple are from Canada.

I fully expect this publisher to increase its journal portfolio. There are about a dozen publishers based in Ontario that match this publisher’s method of operation.

Recognize anything?

2. Science Publishing Group is notable for two things: spam and possible trademark abuse.

This publisher is currently unapologetically engaged in a massive spam campaign. They are spamming researchers all over the world soliciting manuscripts and editorial board applications. They may be harvesting email addresses themselves or they may be purchasing lists from companies that specialize in selling email addresses.

The publisher unabashedly uses the logo for the Google Chrome browser as its logo. Do they think no one will notice?

Science Publishing Group has 52 brand-new journal titles, yet none has any content. It has four education titles, which is rare for a questionable publisher. How will the educational research community — one with many society publishers — respond to these journals?

This publisher claims it’s located at 548 Fashion Avenue in New York, but I think that’s either a fake address or the address of a mail-forwarding agency.

Bad spelling, in so many ways.

3. Business Journalz (BJ) claims to be published by an organization called Global Research Society (sounds impressive, no?) in Essex, U.K., but their domain name registration data lists a Hong Kong address. They claim “chapters” in several other countries.

Of course, this publisher stands out for the clever and cool spelling “Journalz,” which it uses to draw attention (and author fees) to itself. The initialism “BJ” is unfortunate in American English at least and reminds one of the need to hire consultants when developing new brands, for pleasant terms in one language or dialect may be offensive in others.

This publisher has been publishing since 2011. It has three journals that publish monthly.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2012 at 9:46 AM and is filed under Scholarly Open-Access Publishers, spam email, Unethical Practices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.