We show an email exchange between JSM Dentistry (ISSN: 2333-7133), which is published by SciMedCentral, and a potential author. We show the full email exchange and also comment on what we think it means. We also look at some other aspects of the journal and the publisher.
Predatory publishers and journals use a variety of techniques to get you to submit your research articles to them, with one of the most common being unsolicited emails, often praising your previous work, then requesting that you to submit to their journal.
This article looks at their techniques and what you can do about it.
We look at an email exchange, where a predatory journal reduced their Article Processing Charge (APC) from 500 USD to 150 USD, and the author never really had to ask.
But should you negotiate?
In April 2020, Bradley Allf published a paper in “US-China Education Review A.” The paper, entitled “Experiential Learning in Secondary Education Chemistry Courses: A Significant Life Experiences Framework” was totally fake, including authors on the paper being characters from the TV series Breaking bad and the paper loosely following the Breaking Bad story line.
We were recently contacted on Twitter and asked if a particular journal was a fake journal. This was an intriguing question and one which we felt we had to answer, or least look at to see if we could offer advice.
In this article we describe the investigation that we carried out.
What is Open Access Publishing? It seeks to make scientific research papers freely available to anybody who wants to read them, at no cost to the reader. There are two primary types of open access publishing – Gold Open Access and Green Open Access. These sit alongside a traditional publishing model where readers have to pay to read scientific papers.
Predatory publishing is the practice of publishers/journals charging fees to publish scientific articles, yet not providing the services that would normally be expected of a scientific journal. This includes not having robust peer review, thus not ensuring the quality and integrity of the papers which will form part of the scientific archive.
In this article we put a spotlight on, Beall, J. 2009. Bentham Open. The Charleston Advisor 11(1) 29-32. This paper was the first paper by Jeffrey Beall to discuss predatory publishing. In the paper, he analyzes the publisher Bentham Open which, at the time, published 236 journals.
We ran a Twitter poll where we asked is there was a legitimate reason to publish in a predatory journal? This article presents, and discusses, the results.
Predatory journals make money by getting you to pay money for them to publish your article. It might seem unusual if they offer to waive the fee. In this article we explore why they might do that.