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As part of our Twitter account, we tweet snippets from emails that have been passed to us. This image is typical of an email snippet that we have received.
We publish email trails for primarily to educate, but also for entertainment. If you want to read more about this series of articles, take a look at our introductory article, which provides information which we do not want to repeat in every article.
Alternatively, take a look at this link, which leads to articles that are similar to this one.
Journal details
This section provides details of the journal and publisher, along with the date that the original email was sent. We present it here, just so that we have a very quick overview of the key information.
Date of first email: 4 Dec 2020
Journal: JSM Dentistry
ISSN: 2333-7133
Publisher: SciMedCentral
Member of DOAJ?: No
Member of COPE?: No
The first email
An image of the first email is shown above. It says:
“Dear ***********,
We are glad to invite you to contribute an article JSM Dentistry: Current Research which is a renowned journal which possesses indexing in reputed repositories, with a high count of citations.
We would really appreciate if you could consider contributing at least a 2 page short Communication, Mini Review, Case Reports…, as we are in shortfall of one article to close the issue.
Kindly submit your research on or before December 10, 2020.
Please inform me if I can be of any further assistance. Waiting to receive your response as soon as possible.
Kind Regards,
Smith Alison| Editorial Manager,
JSciMed-Central
United States“
Response to EMAIL #1
The person (4 Dec 2020) who received the email responded by saying:
“Thanks for the email. Unfortunately, I cannot meet the 10 Dec deadline, so I will have to politely decline but I hope you find a suitable paper to close the issue.“
… and you would think that would be the end of it, but ….
EMAIL #2
On the 21 Jan 2021 (so about six weeks later), another email was received, which said:
“Dear *********
Hope this email finds you well.
It would be appreciated if you could let us know the status of the submission of your paper.
Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or concerns.
Looking forward to receiving the submission.
Thanks & Regards,
Smith“
It is interesting to note that the subject line has now changed to “******** – Acknowledge!” Previously it was “Invited by – JSM Dentistry“.
If you look at who sent the emails (see the yellow highlights), you will notice that they have come from different email addresses, even though they have included the previous email. We find this a little strange.
Response to EMAIL #2
A response (21 Jan 2021) was made, as follows:
“As I said, I politely declined, so the status is that ‘I could not meet your deadline. In the meantime, I have been working on a couple of papers that I have earmarked for other journals – which I hope to submit in the next month or so.‘”
At the time of writing, this was the last email that was either sent or received.
Our Comments
EMAILs
The most telling point (at least to us) of this email exchange is the non-recognition of the first exchange, where the recipient said that they were not interested. In the the second email, the journal appears not to care, acknowledge or be aware that the potential author has declined. It is also strange that the subject line has changed, as well as the email address.
The journal simply ask about the status of the paper. We suspect that the initial response was just recorded as somebody who might be interested and they are now just send out spam emails (from a different account) and putting the person’s name in the subject line to try and personalize it, so as to catch the attention of the person that receives it.
Ethical procedures
One of the checks we always carry out is whether a journal is a member of DOAJ and/or COPE. We check by accessing the DOAJ and COPE web site, rather than relying on what the journal tells us.
JSM Dentistry is not a member of either COPE or DOAJ.
However, if you look at their publications ethics page (this link from the journal page leads to a generic publisher page for all their journals), it states
“JSciMed Central adheres to the principles of transparency and best ethical practices in scholarly publishing as recommended by the international committees like COPE, DOAJ, OASPA, and WAME“.
This does not say that they are members of these organizations, but, to the unwary, it may give the impression that they are members.
Moreover, what does it mean that they “adhere” to the standard prescribed by these organizations. Where are the checks and balances, who monitors it and how do we know that they are following these ethical procedures?
We also checked OASPA and WAME. We could not find JSM Dentistry listed on the web sites of these organizations.
Article Processing Charges
It is always worth looking at the Article Processing Charges (APCs) for a journal. Not only to see how much they are, but also to see if they are readily available and are transparent.
For this journal (see the figure), there is a link to APCs, but if you hover over that link, it is the same as the page you are on (see the highlighted parts of the figure). This means that you go to the same page and are not taken to the APCs. Threrfore, you cannot easily find the APCs.
We looked at a few other journals from this publisher, and this seems to be a common trait.
We tried to find the APCs for this journal, via the publisher’s page, but could not find them. We suspect that they are available somewhere but they are certainly not easy to find.
Finally
We are interested in hearing from you, if you have an email trail that you think might be of interest, please let us know.
Details about how to send it to us is provided in this article.