When investigating a journal, one area we look at is who it says it is indexed by. There is often a very long list, many of which are questionable; at best.
Scribd
One ‘indexing service’ that is often mentioned is Scribd.
Just to be clear, #Scribd is great. We are big fans and, in our other life, we are subscribers.
However, Scribd does NOT ‘index’ academic journals. Anyone can upload content to Scribd without any quality checks or validation from an academic perspective.
Uploading to Scribd
If you upload content to Scribd, you have to own the copyright.
By definition, the publisher/journal does not own the copyright for an open access scientific paper, although there are examples where a journal will charge an Article Processing Charge and still ask the author to sign over the copyright.
Given that a paper is open access, probably means that anybody can upload it to Scribd, but we are not legal experts – and certainly not on copyright – so we may be wrong in this assumption.
Publishers on Scribd
Occasionally we have looked for particular publishers on Scribd.
We do find the occasional paper but we have yet to find a consistent pattern of uploading all of their papers. We may be wrong and a more depth study would be worthwhile, but most publishers seem to upload only a small proportion of their papers.
Take home message
If a journal says that Scribd indexes its paper, this is (at best) stretching the truth. It is also likely a demonstration that the journal is struggling to show that it is indexed with any of the recognized scientific indexing services, so they will add anything they can to the list of organizations they mention.
If a journal lists Scribd as an indexing service, this is a red flag that the journal could be predatory and it warrants further investigation.
