Question 1
1) Why do you have an Editorial Team that incorporates three types of people?, see https://bit.ly/3atJ6b3.
Looking at the Editorial Team now (see Figure 1), the journal has made some changes. There is no longer the concept of “Editorial Board, Advisories and Promoters” and email addresses are now given.
We do note though that most of the email addresses are not related to an affiliation (e.g. they are gmail, mail.ru etc.). Whilst not an issue for a few people, it does raise concerns when the vast majority of editors have these generic email addresses.
We plan to contact the editors in due course just to check that they know that they are listed.
Just so that we have a record, we have captured the current editorial team on Wayback Machine. You can view the captured page here.
Question 2
2) Your editorial team appear to handle a large number of papers. How do they manage this workload?, see https://bit.ly/3wYZOqt.
If you look at Figure 2, this shows the number of papers published by the journal, by issue, when we reported this number on our last article, which we published on 30 May 2022.
You can see that there was a significant increase in the number of papers published 2022 (i.e. from Volume 6), when compared to previous years.
We have taken another look at the data (see Figure 3), and the number of papers is still significantly more than in previous years. Volume 6-4 has increased from 316 (see Figure 2) to 1,202 (see Figure 3). Issues 6-5 and 6-6 has not published over 1,000 papers yet. We say “yet” as we would not be surprised if the numbers have increased the next time we check.
When we looked at the number of papers in our previous article, one of the observations we made was that the 18 people who made up their editorial team had a high workload.
The editorial team now only comprises 10 members so their workload has significantly increased. Given that the team has almost halved, and the number of papers has increased, their workload has more than doubled.
In fact, if you take issue 6-4 (1,202 papers), with an editorial team of 10 people each member of the team would handle about 120 papers for the papers published in that month.
Question 3
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.
We have checked on the papers that we previously highlighted and they are still available on the journal’s web site.
Question 4
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.
This is related to question 2 and we have nothing to add here.
Question 5
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.
In our previous article, we could not validate the journal’s claim that it was indexed by Scopus. We have checked again and it is now indexed (see Figure 4).
Indeed, its SJR is 0.639 (for 2021), whereas the SJR shown on the journal’s web site is 0.54 (for 2020).
All credit to the journal for being indexed by Scopus. We would raise some concerns with regard to some of the issues we have raised, but it is not for us to say if Scopus are right, or not, to index this journal.
We would also refer you to question 6, which has something to add to this discussion.
Question 6
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.
We never received a response from the journal with regard to this question.
But, we were contacted by one of the editors (in a private message, so we will not name). They said:
“Hoping everything is going well. The publisher of the Journal of Positive School Psychology has been changed for two years ago. I don’t know anything about the new publisher or the editorial members. However, I received many emails. I think it is currently a predator. I informed Scopus about that.“
Question 7
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.
We tried to access some of the articles that were previously “locked” and we still received a message say that a subscription was required to access the article.
Question 8
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.
The previous statement that there were no submission fees, but you had to use a copyedited (which has the same address as the publisher) has not changed.
Question 9
9) Does the journal have an Editor-in-Chief? If so, can we have their name and contact details?, see https://bit.ly/3z5NgQD.
See question 1. There is still no named Editor-in-Chief.
Question 10
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.
We looked at the same paper that we highlighted in our the above tweet, and it still does not have a DOI.
Remarks
Despite their promise, the journal never did get back to us.
It is good to see that the status of the editorial board has been clarified, and that the editors now have email addresses (albeit generic ones).
It is also good to see that the Scopus indexing has been verified.
However, there does remain many aspects of this journal that raises concerns and we will return to it at a later date.