Checking out Opast Publishing Group – Predatory Journals and Conferences

We recently saw a tweet that peaked our interest. The tweet mentioned paper that had been published by the Opast Publishing Group. We were previously unaware of this publisher so we thought it was worth having a look at the publisher and posting a few findings on out Twitter feed.

You can access the posts we have made about Opast Publishing by using the hashtag #OpastFacts.

The background

A paper published in Opast Publishing Group‘s Archives of Epidemiology & Public Health Research journal was greeted as a good paper on Twitter but there were also warnings that the author had published in predatory journal.

We had never heard of this publisher, so we thought we would take a look, just to see what we could find out.

An overview of Opast Publishing Group

Opast Publishing has a portfolio of 108 journals. In our tweet on this topic we stated the number as 107. For this article we checked our facts and it is actually 108. We have listed the journals at the end of this article, just to record the journals at this point in time. You can access their journal page here.

The publisher’s address is in the US) – OPAST GROUP LLC, 10807 W 145th TER, Overland Park, KS 66221, USA

The group started publishing in 2016, with the following journals:

Advances in Nutrition & Food Science
Cardiology: Open Access
International Journal of Cancer Research & Therapy
International Journal of Clinical & Experimental Dermatology
International Journal of Diabetes & Metabolic Disorders
International Journal of Nanotechnology and Nanomedicine
International Journal of Psychiatry
International Journal of Women’s Health Care
Journal of Anesthesia & Pain Medicine
Journal of Clinical & Experimental Immunology
Journal of Clinical Review & Case Reports
Journal of Nursing & Healthcare
Journal of Pediatrics & Neonatal Biology
Journal of Pharmaceutical Research

As far as we can tell, of the 108 journals listed on their web site, 54 of them published papers in 2022. We have not checked whether there is a lot of new journals (so have not published yet), or whether journals that were established a few years ago have not published in 2022.

To give a complete record, here are the years and the number of journals that published papers in those years – 2016(14), 2017 (24), 2018 (36), 2019 (40), 2020 (50), 2021 (57), 2022 (54).

Our findings

Review times

One of the first things we looked at was typical review times, as this is what was mentioned on the initial tweet that we saw. This is the image we posted and you can see the tweet here.

Membership of COPE and DOAJ

Using all the ISSN’s that were available, we checked whether any of those journals were members of COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) or DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals). As shown in the tweet, we found that none of the journals were members of COPE or DOAJ.

Nonsensical article

One tweet we made was about an article we saw that did not make sense to us, admittedly, we are not discipline experts. We asked if the article did make sense. At the time of writing, nobody has expressed a view, but we’d still be interested in hearing any views anybody has.

We also posted another tweet about this paper.

Journals without ISSN's

We mentioned above that we had looked at journals to see if they were members of COPE and DOAJ. We can only do this (at least, automatically) if the journal has an ISSN.

Therefore, it is worth considering how many journals do not have ISSN’s. Of the 108 journals 42 of them do not have an ISSN. You can see the tweet here.

Final Remarks

We have only taken a brief look at Opast Publishing Group. We plan to return to this publisher at a later date to do a more in-depth investigation.

If you want to see all the tweets we have made, follow this link.