We have recently been taking a look at the Journal of Positive School Psychology and tweeting our findings.
You can see the tweets we have done by using this link (which essentially tracks the hashtag #Jnl_PSP), https://twitter.com/search?q=%23Jnl_PSP&src=typed_query&f=live.
We wanted to record some of our findings in an article but, before we did that we invited the journal to comment on the tweets, correct any factual inaccuracies and make any other comments they felt necessary.
In this article, we present the email we sent to the journal and the response we received.
EMAIL to the publisher
EMAIL Date: 07 May 2022
Sent to: submissionjpsp@gmail.com
Subject Line: Questions about Journal of Positive School Psychology
Dear Principal Contact
I hope that we have the right email address. It is the only one we could find on your web site.
We have recently been tweeting about your journal (see https://bit.ly/3wU9Ysm).
We are planning to develop this set of tweets into an article for our blog (see https://predatory-publishing.com/).
We would like to give you the opportunity to respond to some of our tweets, so that we can correct any factual inaccuracies and/or explain the circumstances around the information we have presented.
For example:
1) Why do you have an Editorial Team that incorporates three types of people?, see https://bit.ly/3atJ6b3.
2) Your editorial team appear to handle a large number of papers. How do they manage this workload?, see https://bit.ly/3wYZOqt.
3) We found significant plagiarism in one of the papers you have published (we have not checked any others). Given the plagiarism checks that you carry out, how could this happen?, see https://bit.ly/3z3FLtk and https://bit.ly/3wUaR5o.
4) You have recently significantly increased the number of papers that you have published. What was the reason for this?, see https://bit.ly/3GIWpAB and https://bit.ly/3aulBi6.
5) We cannot correlate your claimed Scopus SJR rating on the Scopus web site. Could you justify where you got this information from?, https://bit.ly/3LVer3d.
6) Do Jolanta Burke and Dr Gokmen Arslan write your editorials? Would you be able to provide their contact details?, see https://bit.ly/38yoIVG.
7) We believe you claim that all of your articles are Open Access, yet this does not seem to be the case. Can you explain the rationale behind your Open Access policy?, see https://bit.ly/3sYrURp.
8) Can you explain the relationship between yourselves and the copyeditors that you insist authors use? The companies appear to be co-located, see https://bit.ly/3sZcmNa.
9) Does the journal have an Editor-in-Chief? If so, can we have their name and contact details?, see https://bit.ly/3z5NgQD.
10) You do not appear to allocate a DOI to every article, as you claim to do. Is this a fair assessment?, see https://bit.ly/3M2koeJ.
Response from Journal
We sent the email to the publishers on 07 May 2022. We received an email 30 minutes later, which said.
“We have gone through your comments and asked the editors to reply within a week. Regarding publication policy you can read on website.“
We responded, by saying:
“Many thanks, we appreciate your prompt response.
We will take a look at your publication policy, which we assume is this page:
https://www.journalppw.com/index.php/jpsp/publication_ethics
Thank you again and we look forward to hearing from the editors in due course.“
At the time of writing (30 May 2022), no response has been received.
Conclusion
- We were very pleased that we received a response within 30 minutes of emailing the journal. The fact that they did not respond, as promised, is disappointing.
- We note that the email comes from a generic email account, that is “JPSP Editorial Board <submissionjpsp@gmail.com>“. That is, we don’t have a person’s name and it is not from a the journal’s domain but rather from a gmail account.
- We still would like to hear from the journal and, until we do, we have to assume that they cannot adequately respond to the questions that we posed.
- We will continue to monitor this journal just to see if anything changes and/or we see anything else of interest.