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Novel Practices in Medical Study from Crimson Publishers

Introduction

If you follow us on Twitter, you may be aware that one of the things we do is to feature quotes from EMAILs from (possibly) predatory journals. You can see these tweets here.

We ask people to forward EMAILs that might be suitable for this part of our Twitter feed, and we are very grateful to everybody who does.

One EMAIL we saw, did not really have anything in it that was unusual, or particularly funny, but we were drawn to it for another reason. That is, it was asking for submissions to Volume 1, Issue 1 of Novel Practices in Medical Study. We thought that it might be worth taking a look at that journal, just to see how it has performed, given that it has been a year since that EMAIL was sent.

The EMAIL

The EMAIL we saw is as follows:

Date: 13 November 2021
Title: Mark the email Dear Professor

“Dear Professor,
Hope you are doing well.

We are in shortfall of one article for successful release of Volume 1 Issue 1. Is it possible for you to support us with your 2page opinion or mini review for this issue?

We are confident that you are always will be there to support us.

Await your positive response.

Lucy Clements
Crimson Publishers | Novel Practices in Medical Study“

Crimson Publishers

Novel Practices in Medical Study is published by Crimson Publishers (which has a Twitter account if you are interested).

Crimson Publishers have a portfolio of 70 journals and states that it is indexed by a variety of agencies (see Figure 1). We have archived the list of journals published by Crimson Publishers, which you can access here (archived 28 Nov 2022).

Obvious omissions from their indexing are the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), Web of Science and Scopus. We have archived the indexing page, which you can access here (archived 28 Nov 2022).

Figure 1: The agencies that index Crimson Publishers

The Article Processing Fees (APCs) for all of Crimson Publishers’ journals is shown in Figure 2. We note that this is taken from a page at the level of the publisher. That is, the APCs appear to be the same across all of their journals. We have archived the APC page, which you can access here (archived 28 Nov 2022).

Figure 2: Article Processing Charges for Crimson Publiishers' journals

The editorial board for the journal is shown in Figure 3. We note that none of the entries provide an EMAIL address, which is always a frustration of ours. We have archived this page, which you can access here (archived 28 Nov 2022).

Figure 3: Editorial board of Novel Practices in Medical Study

Novel Practices in Medical Study

Looking at the journal’s web site, both the Current Issue link (archived here, 28 Nov 2022) and the Archive link (archived here, 28 Nov 2022) lead to pages that says that the information is coming soon (see Figure 4).
Figure 4: Novel Practices in Medical Study, showing the Current Issue and Archive are not yet available

Articles in Press

The articles listed as being in press are shown in Figure 5. The red numbers have been added, so that we can more easily refer to the articles later. We have archived this page here (archived 28 Nov 2022).

Figure 5: Articles in Press in Novel Medical Practices in Medical Study

We note the following:

  1. Although these articles are listed as “Article [sic] in Press“, it also shows them as being in Volume 1, Issue 1.
  2. The articles were all published in 2021 (October, January, April and November). It does not look like the journal has published any articles in 2022 (but see the below).
  3. If you click on the article, it does not take you to the article but to to publisher’s home page. Similarly, clicking on any of the Abstract, Full-Text or e-Pub links also takes you to the publisher’s home page. Hopefully, the publisher will correct that, as other journals do not have this issue.
  4. Clicking on the author names just takes you back to the articles in press page. Although we have not looked at every journal, the few checks we carried it, they also did the same.

Comments on articles

  1. We make general comments about the four articles that have been published by Novel Practices in Medical Study. These are only brief comments as we are not carrying out a full review of the articles. The list numbers are in reference to the red numbers in Figure 5.
    1.  This article (you can download a version we archived from here), says it was submitted on 24 September 2021 and was published on 21 October 2021. This aligns with the date given on the web page (see Figure 5).
    2. This article (you can download a version we archived from here), says it was submitted on 7 December 2021 and was published on 26 January 2022. This does not agree with the web page that says it was published in January 2021 (see Figure 5). We suspect this is just an error in the year on either the paper or the web site.
    3. This article (you can download a version we archived from here), says it was submitted on 20 December 2021 and was published on 22 April 2022. This does not agree with the web page that says it was published in April 2021 (see Figure 5). We suspect this is just an error in the year on either the paper or the web site.
    4. This article (you can download a version we archived from here), says it was submitted on 11 October 2021 and was published on 10 November 2022. This does not agree with the web page that says it was published in November 2021 (see Figure 5). We suspect this is just an error in the year on either the paper or the web site.

Of the four papers it appears that three of them have metadata errors, either on the web page, or the paper itself, with regard to the date the paper was published.

Final Comments

This is not a full review of Novel Practices in Medical Study, so we are not saying whether the journal is predatory or note.
We would say that there are some worrying signs about the journal (such as no EMAIL addresses for the editors, no association with agencies such as DOAJ and COPE and inconsistencies in the metadata) that makes us feel that this journal, and the publisher, is worthy of further investigation.
To this end, it is on the list of publishers that we plan to take a closer look at.

How else can you help?

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