We have developed a web page that enables you to check whether a journal is recognized by these organizations, rather than having to go to the individual web sites of each organization. The URL to access our web page is https://predatory-publishing.com/ISSNCheck/?issn=1234-5678.
We show an email exchange between JSM Dentistry (ISSN: 2333-7133), which is published by SciMedCentral, and a potential author. We show the full email exchange and also comment on what we think it means. We also look at some other aspects of the journal and the publisher.
As part of our Twitter account, we tweet snippets from emails that have been passed to us.
But this is only part of the story. Sometimes, the complete email is more informative and, sometimes, it is worth seeing a more complete version of the email correspondence, if the person that received the email decides to respond.
This series of articles addresses this, providing full email trails, which we hope are both interesting, informative and useful.
Predatory publishers and journals use a variety of techniques to get you to submit your research articles to them, with one of the most common being unsolicited emails, often praising your previous work, then requesting that you to submit to their journal.
This article looks at their techniques and what you can do about it.
The publisher JScholar claims that papers that it publishes will be indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). JScholar, or the journals it publishes, are not indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals. Therefore, using the DOAJ logo on their web sites is not right.
The Scope Database web site, in some places, looks the same as the Scopus web site. As far as we can see there is no relationship between the Scope Database and Scopus and we can only conclude that Scope Database is trying to fool the unwary researcher.
We are often asked if a journal is legitimate. We can’t answer every request but we can provide some advice, which is to carry out an initial check to see if the journal is a member of COPE, DOAJ, Scopus and/or Web of Science.
We look at an email exchange, where a predatory journal reduced their Article Processing Charge (APC) from 500 USD to 150 USD, and the author never really had to ask.
But should you negotiate?
In April 2020, Bradley Allf published a paper in “US-China Education Review A.” The paper, entitled “Experiential Learning in Secondary Education Chemistry Courses: A Significant Life Experiences Framework” was totally fake, including authors on the paper being characters from the TV series Breaking bad and the paper loosely following the Breaking Bad story line.
We were recently contacted on Twitter and asked if a particular journal was a fake journal. This was an intriguing question and one which we felt we had to answer, or least look at to see if we could offer advice.
In this article we describe the investigation that we carried out.