History
This web site, and the associated 𝕏 (formerly Twitter) account, was set up in August 2018. Up until 17 Aug 2024, the web site, and 𝕏 account, was run anonymously.
This was done due to the experiences of other ‘sleuths’ who, although getting a lot of support from the community, have been abused, have received threats and have faced legal action. We (obviously) wanted to avoid that.
We were particularly influenced by the experiences of Jeffrey Beall, a topic I have written about in:
Kendall, G. Beall’s legacy in the battle against predatory publishers. In Learned Publishing, 34 (3): 379-388, 2021. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/leap.1374
Right from the outset, we said that once our 𝕏 account reached 10,000 followers, we would go public (i.e. reveal who is behind these accounts). We achieved that on 16th June 2024 when one of our posts went viral and has, at the time of writing, attracted over 940,000 impressions.
As a result of that post, over a few days , we went from 9,126 followers to 14,111 followers. Given that we had been getting 5-6 new followers a day, we thought we had about 4-5 months before we went public. It’s true to say that I was caught by surprise and have spent the last couple of months getting ready to go public, which I announced we would on 17th Aug 2024 and that is what we have done.
In truth, I was not fully ready. There was so much that I wanted to do, but some of these will now have to be done post revealing who is behind this account.
Our guiding principles
We have published the principles by which we operate under. You can see these here.
How are we funded?
One of the frequent questions we get is, how we are funded. We posted an article about this, which gives the status at the time of writing (August 2024).
Who runs this web site?
This web site, and the 𝕏 account is managed by Professor Graham Kendall.
I am currently one of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor at MILA University, Malaysia.
Previously I was the Provost/CEO for the University of Nottingham, Malaysia and also a Pro-Vice Chancellor of the global University of Nottingham.
I was at the University of Nottingham (UK and Malaysia) for about 21 years.
I have been an Associate Editor for a number of journals and have served as an Editor-in-Chief for an IEEE Transactions journal.
Social media accounts
Here are my social media accounts. I also have a web page, but this is currently being updated.
Research interests
Ethical Publishing
In recent years, I have had a growing interest in ethical publishing, using that term in a very broad sense.
This interest started around 2019 when I got interested in the work of Jeffrey Beall and his list. This led to my first paper in this area:
Kendall, G. (2021) Beall’s legacy in the battle against predatory publishers, Learned Publishing, 34 (3): 379-388. DOI: 10.1002/leap.1374
Since then, I have been fortunate enough to publish a few more papers in this, and related, areas. You can see these papers below.
- (2024) The OMICS Group and Its Agents: An Evidence Base
- (2024) More Transparency is Needed When Citing h-Indexes, Journal Impact Factors and CiteScores
- (2024) Risks of abuse of large language models, like ChatGPT, in scientific publishing: Authorship, predatory publishing, and paper mills
- (2024) Are open access fees a good use of tax payers money?
- (2024) The Chinese Early Warning Journal List: Strengths, weaknesses and solutions in the light of China’s global scientific rise
- (2024) Undeclared use of third party service providers in academic publishing is unethical: A scoping review
- (2023) Academia should stop using Beall’s Lists and reviews their use in previous studies
- (2023) (Mis-)Classification of 17,721 Journals by an Artificial Intelligence Predatory Journal Detector
- (2023) What does ChatGPT advise about predatory publishing?
- (2022) Drawing Inspiration from the World of Fine Art in the Battle Against Predatory Publishing
- (2022) Predatory Journals: Revisiting Beall’s Research
- (2022) Would You Review Seven Papers a Day, Every Day, For a Year?
- (2021) Case Study: What Happens to a Journal after it Accepts a Spoof Paper?
- (2021) Beall’s legacy in the battle against predatory publishers
- (2016) Is There a Role for Publication Consultants and How Should Their Contribution be Recognized?
You can see full details of these publications here.
Computer Science
My primary research discipline is Computer Science, with a focus on Operations Research, Meta and Hyper-heuristics and Evolutionary Computation. My main research areas are shown below.
Methodologies: Operations Research (OR), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Evolutionary Computation (EC), Meta/Hyper-heuristics
Domains: Scheduling, Logistics, Vehicle Routing, Meta & Hyper-heuristics and Games, specifically to address real world problems
You can see all the papers I have published here.
Document history
- 17 Aug 2024: Initial version.