Directory of Open Access Publishers release new criteria for special issues
The Directory of Open Access Journals has released its criteria for special issues. We comment on these.
The Directory of Open Access Journals has released its criteria for special issues. We comment on these.
We would like to invite those that are interested in our work to become one of our patrons.
This will support us financially, which will enable us to do even more but, importantly, it will also enable us to be more targeted in areas that are of direct interest to the community.
We will also be able to engage with our patrons in a more meaningful way, especially those who, like us, want to eliminate predatory publishing and fake journals.
SCIREA is a scientific publisher that has a portfolio of 39 journals. These 39 journals have 13,288 editors, meaning that each journal has an average of 341 editors. Each of these editors has handled less than one paper each, over the last five years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Global Impact Factor (GIF) ranks journals using quantitative and qualitative methodologies in order to evaluate the prestige of journals. The evaluation considers factors such as peer review, originality, quality, technical editing quality, editorial quality and regularity.
What was the first open access journal? We believe that it is Flora Online that started publishing in January 1987. The journal ceased publication in November 1993, after publishing 29 issues.
We say, “we believe” (take a look at our evidence), so if you know different, let us know.