This is likely to have a will have a dramatic impact on some publishers.
We share a few of our comments/thoughts from when we read the statement
It would be good to see, in any special issue, of which the journal and/or publisher is a member of DOAJ, the Editor-in-Chief making a statement that it has abided by the DOAJ guidelines.
It is good to see that the number of papers authored by the guest editors is limited to 25%. We would have preferred an ever stronger statement, such as,
“A guest editor cannot be an author on more than one paper in any special issue AND the paper must include a declaration that the paper was handled by another editor who does not have a conflict of interest (e.g. works at the same instutition and has not co-authored with that editor in the previous five years).”
The last statement, that is:
“DOAJ will not accept a journal if all content in the last year/volume is published as special issues.“
… seems a little weak, assuming that we are reading it correctly. Our reading is, if a journal publishes JUST ONE regular paper in the previous year, that is okay? So, if 1,000 articles are published in special issues, and just a few (let’s say 10) are published in regular issues, then DOAJ would not have a problem with that? Would it not be better to have some percentage of papers published an a calendar year must be published in regular issues? And, in our mind that percentage should be reasonably small, say 5%.
However, despite these concerns, this initiative is welcomed.
Finally, this article was originally posted as a tweet. We hope that we have removed the (many, sorry) typo’s that were in that tweet.
If you do not have the time, or the inclination to read all of this article, the take home message is that we are asking you to consider becoming a patron in order to support our work.
PLEASE NOTE: Whenever you decide to support us, you will be charged for the full amount for that month. This is the way Patreon works, at least for the way we have joined the scheme.
So, if you join on the 15th of the month you will be charged the full amount for that month and then charged again on the 1st of the following month. We are unable to provide refunds, or accept part payment for the month you start supporting us. If you want to avoid this (although you can still access all the services offered in that month), we suggest that you join us at the start of a month, so that you get the full benefit for that month.
Our blog has been running for a similar amount of time and we have published around 50 articles. We would like to publish many more. We have lots of ideas but there are always time pressures and writing a blog posts takes quite a lot of time.
Our web site also supports our Twitter account and blog. We hope to develop the web site in the future to provide even more information.
Thank you
We have been delighted with the level of engagement we have received since we started this initiative.
We do track some metrics, albeit in an ad-hoc way, and it shows a general increase in interaction since we started our Twitter and blog.
We are indebted to all those that have supported us. Thank you.
Controversy
We recognize that we are tackling a very controversial area, where others before us have faced significant difficulties. This is the reason why we are, at the moment, remaining anonymous. Once we have the trust of the scientific community and some traction, we will be more transparent about who is behind this initiative. The target we have set ourselves in 10,000 Twitter followers but we do review this as a goal from time to time but, at the moment, this is still out goal. At the time of writing we are about 37% towards that goal.
"Can you help/advise me, or do you have a view?"
As we have gained more exposure and traction, we are often asked questions, or for our views, about journals and publishers. Although we respond, we often have to say that “we will add it to our ever growing list and will look at the journal/publisher when time allows.“
We do work through that list but it is a little ad-hoc and, to be honest, we choose the ones that we think are most interesting. It might be useful if we had a way of prioritizing the journals/publishers that we look at.
What are our plans?
With your help, we hope that we can develop this platform even further and do more than we are doing at the moment.
We have the following ideas that, with your help, we can progress.
We are asking our patrons (see below) to request reviews of journals and publishers, this will not only make the content we produce more relevant but it will also provide a constant source of content that we hope our supporters will find interesting.
As we develop our database of journals and publishers, we will compile a searchable database so that others can find out about the journals and publishers that we have investigated.
The number of blog posts we can produce at the moment is limited, due to time limitations and other calls on our time. If our patrons are keen to write about predatory journals (see below), this would not only add additional blog posts but also give a different perspective, rather than just hearing our views all of the time.
We are considering starting a YouTube channel that focuses on Predatory Publishing, but this is not possible at the moment. We are keeping this idea on the “nice to do” list, but we need more time and/or support to be able to progress.
We would like to develop some short courses, so that scholars can have a more structured way to learn about predatory publishers, enabling them to avoid the pit falls. Like the YouTube channel, we require more time/support.
We have reported on several occasions sting operations against predatory journals. We believe that this is an effective way to highlight those journals that are operating in a predatory way. We would like to have a sustained way of testing suspected journals, rather than just having one off examples. That said, we must be careful not to waste the time of legitimate journals.
We would like to publish peer reviewed papers, in (obviously) non-predatory journals that record the results of our findings. If others are willing we would be delighted to co-author papers with like minded researchers.
Given the data and knowledge that we have accumulated during our journey, we would like to publish a book that provides the history of predatory publishing, the state of predatory publish at the present time and what can be done about it going forward. This will be a longer term project but the first stage is to find potential co-authors and then develop a proposal for a suitable publisher.
For those of you that follow our Twitter account, you will see that we tweet on various topics, such as EMAIL snippets from (probably) predatory journals and quotes from papers on predatory publishing. Some of you may have noticed that these tweets follow a similar layout and the reason that we are able to tweet so regularly is because we have automated much of the processes behind these tweets. It is not really to do with predatory publishing but we are thinking about sharing some of the ways we do this, perhaps on a different platform.
Our longer term plans include working with research institutes to provide a more bespoke service that we can offer at the moment.
Become a Patron
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.
If you would like to be come a patron, please use this link and below we outline the various levels at which you can support us.
PLEASE NOTE: Whenever you decide to support us, you will be charged for the full amount for that month. This is the way Patreon works, at least for the way we have joined the scheme.
So, if you join on the 15th of the month you will be charged the full amount for that month and then charged again on the 1st of the following month. We are unable to provide refunds, or accept part payment for the month you start supporting us. If you want to avoid this (although you can still access all the services offered in that month), we suggest that you join us at the start of a month, so that you get the full benefit for that month.
1. Supporter
You will receive a monthly newsletter, that contains information that is either exclusive to our patrons or is provided ahead of time of being published on our other platforms. We will also use you as a sounding board for some of the ideas that we have.
2. Contributor
If you are interested in predatory/fake publishing and/or want to get some experience in writing/blogging, we would welcome one blog post a month from you. This will be published on our blog site (subject to editorial controls). We will help you to get the blog post as good as it can be so that it is a credit to you and us.
3. Journal Review
In each calendar month, you can request a review of a specific journal. We will provide some key data points (assuming the data is available). We will try to include:
Whether the journal is recognized, or a member of, organizations such as ISSN, COPE, DOAJ and Scopus.
Where the journal is located?
How long it has been operating?
How many articles have been published?
Whether it is an open access journal.
What are its Article Processing Charges (APCs)?
We will also provide our thoughts/comments as we carry out the investigation.
We will share this review on our blog site, so as to help others, but we will delay that post for at least a month so that you have the information before anybody else.
4. Publisher Review
In each calendar month, you can request a review of a specific publisher. We will provide key data points (assuming the data is available). We will try to include the following:
How many journals the publisher has in their portfolio?
Where the publisher is located?
How long they have been operating?
Whether they are indexed/members of organisations such as ISSN, COPE, DOAJ and Scopus?
Whether they are only an open access publisher.
We will also provide our thoughts/comments as we carry out the investigation.
We are happy for you to request a review of a journal, rather than a publisher.
We will share this review on our blog site, in order to help others, but we will delay that post for at least a month so that you have the information before anybody else
5. Multiple Journal Reviews
This level of support provides the same as an individual journal review, but you can request up to four journal reviews in any calendar month. This provides one review free of charge when compared to the single journal review option.
6. Multiple Publisher Reviews
This level of support provides the same as an individual publisher review, but you can request up to four publisher reviews in any calendar month. This provides one review free of charge when compared to the single publisher review option.
7. Premium Supporter
This provides access to all of our other services. You will receive our newsletter, you can write a blog post each month and you can request both journal/publisher reviews, up to 10 in a calendar month, split across journal and publishers, whichever best meets your requirements.
As a premium supporter we will also provide you the other reviews that we have done at least a week before we publish them on our blog and/or web site, so that you get to see them before others (expect those that requested the review – they will get them first).
"I can't provide financial support at the moment"
We welcome any help that people can afford but if you cannot help at the present time (for whatever reason) no problem.
We hope that you will stay engaged and help us say spreading the word so that others can see what we are doing.
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.
The aim of these articles is to gain an insight into a specific journal or publisher and get a view of their practices and how they operate. We are particularly keen to provide an evidence based analysis, rather than being (too) subjective.
We occasionally give a view as to whether we believe a journal, or publisher, is predatory but we would rather present our findings and let others be the judge.
In this article, we present the data we have collected for SCIREA, with regard to the number of editors they have.
Who are SCIREA?
SCIREA is an open access publisher that publishes 39 journals (as at July 2021). Its Article Processing Charges (APC) are about USD 230. Each journal has its own APC page, but the ones we looked at were all USD 230.
None of the SCIREA journals appear to have an ISSN and they do not seem to be members of either COPE or DOAJ.
Looking at their web site, the majority of the journals started publishing in 2016. They generally publish each year, but there are some notable exceptions. For example, the SCIREA Journal of Hydraulic Engineering has published four articles, one in October 2016, one in October 2019, one in February 2019 and one in February 2021.
To carry out our analysis we collected the following data:
The journal names
The journal URLs
How many editors each journal has
How many papers each journal has published
The data for each of the journals was collected manually, which was an easy task as there are only 39 journals. We also captured the URL of the journal as this would be useful later.
The editors are listed at one URL (as well as being listed on each journal’s pages). Nineteen editors are listed on each page and there are 700 pages (the final page has less then 19 editors listed). Each editor has their name, country, institution and the journal they serve. It was an easy matter to write a script to scrape the data from the web site. We had to scrape the web site, as manually collecting all the editor data was not possible.
Each individual journal lists all of the articles that it has published on a single page. It was easy just to collect the total number of papers each journal had published, by inspection. Note, we did not collect information about each article, just the number of articles that had been published.
This data collection showed that SCIREA publishes 39 journals, they have 13,288 editors and have published 654 papers (as at July 2021).
SCIREA: Number of Editors by Journal
Figure 2: The number of editors for each of SCIREA's journals (click to see larger image)
Figure 2 graphically shows the number of editors for each of SCIREA’s journal. There is a lot of data on the image, and if you click on it, you’ll see a larger version. We have also presented this data in Table 1, as this may be preferable for some people.
In total, SCIREA has 13,288 editors across its portfolio of 39 journals. That is an average of 341 editors serving each journal.
The number of editors ranges from 1,054 (SCIREA Journal of Physics) to 25 (SCIREA Journal of Surveying and Mapping). The number of editors, alone, is not really relevant unless you make a relative comparison, with the number of papers that the journal has published,which we do below.
[table id=072_001 /]
SCIREA: Number of Articles by Journal
Figure 3: The number of articles for each of SCIREA's journals (click to see larger image)
Figure 3 shows the number of articles that have been published by each journal in the SCIREA portfolio. SCIREA has published a total of 654 articles.
The number of papers published ranges from 85 (SCIREA Journal of Clinical Medicine) to one article for three journals. Two journals have yet to publish.
It should be noted that this is the number of articles since each journal started publishing which, is typically in late 2016. As we mention above, some of the journals publish regularly, but others are a little more erratic. We assume that the publication schedule is dictated by the submissions (and acceptances) that the journals receive.
We realize that Figure 3 is quite detailed. You can see a larger image by clicking on it, but we have also provided the data in Table 2 for those readers that find it easier to access the data in that format.
[table id=072_002 /]
How many papers does an editor handle?
Table 2 also shows (final column) the average number of articles that each editor has handled. This is calculated by taking the number of editors (see Table 1) and dividing it by the number of articles that have been published (see Table 2). In looking at this figure, the following should be noted:
The total number of articles is the total that have been published since the journal was started. That is, it is NOT the number of articles in (say) a twelve month period.
The number of papers we have calculated that has been handled by each editor is measured over the lifetime of the journal, NOT how many articles have been handled (say) every year.
Most of the journals started in 2016 so, if you want to calculate how many articles are handled each year by the editors you would need to divide the number by about 5.
The journal that has the highest “Articles per Editor” figure is the SCIREA Journal of Astronomy. On average, each of the 26 editors has handled 0.23 papers. This journal has only published six articles, one in 2017, two in 2018 and three in 2019. They are still inviting submissions, so we assume that the journal is still active.
This figure of 0.23 assumes that the number of papers published was the same number as were submitted. This is not a good assumption as any journal will have rejected a number of papers, but these still have to be handled by one of the editors.
If we assume that the rejection rate is 50%, then the number of papers handled by each editor would be 0.46.
You might feel that a 50% rejection rate is unrealistic. Let’s say that the SCIREA Journal of Astronomy rejects 75% of the papers it receives. This would mean that, on average, each editor would handle 0.92 papers.
To be absolutely clear, even if the journal rejected 75% of the papers it received, the 26 editors of SCIREA Journal of Astronomy, would have handled less than one paper each. And this is over the lifetime of the journal (four years), so that would be less then 0.25 papers each year, for each editor.
Every other journal in SCIREA’s portfolio has an average less than the SCIREA Journal of Astronomy, meaning that, on average, none of their 13,228 has handled more than one paper since the publisher started in (typically) 2016.
Final Remarks
Given how many papers SCIREA has published, they appear to have a lot of editors. So many in fact, that on average each editor would handle less than one paper every five years, and possibly a lot less.
In our experience, a typical editor would be expected to handle 5-6 papers a year. Of course, disciplines differ and that number could be a lot less and we know of editors that have handled many more.
Perhaps our analysis is in this article is wrong and that we have not fully understood how the journal works. Perhaps the editors carry out more work than we are suggesting?
We would be delighted to hear from an SCIREA editor who we would give the opportunity to relate their experiences in a blog post. We would also be delighted to hear from the the journal itself and we offer them the same opportunity to respond to this article, which we would be delighted to publish.
Finally, we have been tweeting about SCIREA and if you want to see these tweets, please follow this link.
Disclosure: This page contains affiliate links. This means, at no additional cost to you, we receive a commission if you click through and make a purchase.
When we start looking at a journal, to determine whether if it is predatory or not, we always check to see if it is recognized by:
To do this we use the ISSN as this is a unique identifier, or at least it should be. Not being a recognized by one of these organizations is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does start to raise warning bells that warrant further investigation.
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 provide a few more details about using this tool later in this article.
Why would you want to check a journal's membership?
The reasons we carry out initial checks to check whether a journal is recognized by ISSN, COPE and DOAJ are as follows:
If a journal is claiming that it has an ISSN, the ISSN portal is the place to check that claim, just to make sure that ISSN has a record of that ISSN number and that it matches with what you believe it to be.
IMPORTANTLY, check that the journal name matches the journal name that the journal is claiming. You might find this a surprising thing to say, but look at our article How to spot a fake journal | A case study. This case study showed that the journal had an ISSN of 0378-1844. Using our tool (see Figure 2), you can see that the journal is recognized by ISSN, with the journal name being Interciencia.
Figure 2: Checking which organizations ISSN 0378-1844 is recognized by
If you look at the journal’s home page, that the case study was investigating, you will see that journal is called Interciencia Journal. The name is ever so slightly different, yet it claims to have the same ISSN number (0378-1844). For completeness the home page of the real journal is here.
In this case, we have two different journals, but one of them is fake (i.e. trying to leverage off the other ones reputation). Importantly, both journals use the same ISSN.
Apart from checking that the ISSN actually exists, it is worth looking a little further and making sure that the journal name matches exactly.
Committee on Publications Ethics (COPE)
Figure 3: COPE logo
COPE is an organization, where subscribing journals/publishers agree to adhere to the ethical guidelines that COPE publishes.
It may not be a problem if a journal/publisher is not a member of COPE. Many reputable, high quality journals aren’t, so it is not immediately a black mark if a given journal is not a member of COPE.
If a journal is a member, that is a good sign as you know that the checks/balances that COPE carry out have been passed by the journal/publisher.
What is more of a worry is that some journals may not be entirely truthful, so it is worth checking the following:
If a journal uses the COPE logo on its web site, but has no right to do so (i.e. it is not a member of COPE). That is, you should not take at face value if a journal is displaying the COPE logo. ALWAYS go to the COPE web site, or us our tool, to validate this claim.
Some journals do not display the COPE logo but say things such as “Our ethical guidelines, with regard to peer review and editorial practices, follow those prescribed by COPE“. This should start to ring warning bells as, even if that is true, if they are not actually a member of COPE, who is checking that the guidelines are followed. It could just be a bland statement which is not verifiable. Moreover, it could be trying to mislead potential authors that they are members of COPE, when they are not.
Directory of Open Access Journals
DOAJ is a membership based service. Journals apply, are vetted by DOAJ and, if they pass DOAJ’s admittance criteria they are accepted.
What is important to note about DOAJ is that, as its name suggests, it only applicable to open access journals. So, if a journal is not open access, it will not be registered with DOAJ, no matter how good or bad it is.
Even if a journal is open access and it is not a member of DOAJ, this is not necessarily a bad sign. It is worthy of further investigation but an open access journal is not required to be a member of DOAJ.
Some journals will incorrectly display the DOAJ logo, so even if you see the logo on a web site it is worth checking through our tool or directly with the DOAJ web site. Do not just assume that, because the DOAJ logo is displayed that the journal is a member of DOAJ. Carry out the check yourself
How do you check a journal?
As we said, we always check whether a journal is recognized by ISSN, COPE and DOAJ. We can do this by going to the relevant web sites and putting in the information. Indeed, we would suggest that you do this if you want to be totally sure that the information is correct and up to date. We believe our tool is accurate and up to date, but if you want to be really sure go directly to the source.
Of course, you can also use our tool. Essentially, this accesses the three web sites for you and displays the results on a single page (see Figure 2). To do this, we take advantage of the web site’s API (Application Programming Interfaces) or by directly accessing the underlying elements that make up the web page. This often referred to as web scraping. The purpose of this article is not to teach you how to use an API, or how to scrape a web page, but there are plenty of resources out there that allow you to do that. You can search for it, and follow the various pages and/or videos. Alternatively, you might find these books helpful (affiliation links).
To use our tool, you use the URL below, adding the required ISSN to the end. For example, if you want to check ISSN ‘3456-6789’, you would use the URL:
If you click on the link above, it will show that the ISSN does not exist, but you can now simply edit the URL to put in the ISSN that you want to check.
Note, the format of an ISSN is four digits, followed by a hyphen, followed by another four digits (although the final digit can be an ‘X’ as it is a check digit).
Summary
When we are checking a journal, three of the initial checks we carry out are to find out if the ISSN number they are using is recognized by ISSN. We also check whether they are members of COPE and DOAJ.
You can do this by going to the individual web sites but we have developed a tool that carries out these three check using a single web page. The URL for this web page is https://predatory-publishing.com/ISSNCheck/?issn=3456-6789. You just need to supply your own ISSN.
We write these fact check articles to verify whether a given statement is true or not. These articles are, by design, short and focus on just one issue, rather than carrying out a detailed study.
Fact to be checked: Is the publisher JScholar indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)?
JScholar, and the journals they publish, use the DOAJ logo on their web sites, which suggests that they are recognized by DOAJ and that the journal and publisher are indexed by DOAJ. Moreover, an email they sent suggests that the papers that they publish will be indexed by DOAJ. We want to validate the use of the DOAJ logo on their web site.
Date of fact check: 16 Jan 2021.
Summary of finding: The publisher JScholar claims that papers that it publishes will be indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). JScholar, and the journals it publishes, are not indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals. Therefore, they should not be using the DOAJ logo on their web site(s).
Journal of Dentistry and Oral Health
The catalyst of this fact check was an email from the Journal of Dentistry and Oral Health. We thought we would start by looking at this journal and then take a look at the publisher.
Claiming it is Indexed by DOAJ
Figure 1: EMAIL received from Journal of Denistry and Oral Health (2332-4856)
We were passed this email (see Figure 1), which we received on 29 Sep 2020. It requested that the researcher submits an article to the Journal of Dentistry and Oral Health (ISSN: 2332-4856), which is published by JScholaronline.
We have highlighted the paragraph that is of interest in the context of this article.
The journal claims that, once the article is published, it will be indexed in DOAJ (which we assume to mean the Directory of Open Access Journals). This claim is not only made on the email, but the DOAJ logo also appears on the footer of their home page (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Home page of the Journal of Dentistry and Oral Health, showing claimed affiliation with DOAJ
Checking DOAJ affiliation
Using the search facility on the DOAJ web site, it is easy to check whether a journal is indexed by DOAJ. Figure 3 shows the result of that search using the ISSN (2332-4856) (if you are unsure what an ISSN is, take a look at our article “What is an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number)?“). We also searched by the journal name, with the same results (that is, the journal was not found).
Figure 3: Search for the Journal of Dentistry and Oral Health (using the ISSN) on DOAJ
Just to be clear, the Journal of Dentistry and Oral Health (ISSN 2232-4856) is not indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals, despite what it says on the email they sent and the fact that yhey use the DOAJ logo on their web site.
JScholar
The Journal of Dentistry and Oral Health is published by JScholar. The publisher’s home page, like the journal, display the DOAJ logo at the bottom of their home page. We decided to look at each of the journals published by JScholar as it might be the case that some of their journals are registered by DOAJ and they just use the DOAJ logo, perhaps naively, but at least there would be some justification.
At the time of writing (16 Jan 2021), JScholar published 24 journals (see Table 1).
Seven of those journals did not have an ISSN, being labelled as “Under Processing” when looking at the journal web site.
None of the other 17 journals were indexed by DOAJ, when we searched by the journal’s ISSN.
[table id=060_001 /]
As another check, we also search for the publisher on the DOAJ web site. The publisher could not be found.
As a final check, we also searched for a few article titles that the publisher had published. None that we searched for could be found on the DOAJ web site.
Conclusion
This fact check started with an email from a specific journal. The journal claimed that it would index any accepted papers with DOAJ. As the journal is not recognized by DOAJ, this would not be possible.
We extended the investigation to the publisher (JScholar) and neither the publisher, or the journals’ it publishes are indexed by DOAJ.
We can only conclude that JScholar, and the journals it publishes, are using the DOAJ logo in a way that is designed to mislead potential authors, as well readers that visit their web site.
Comments/Suggestions
If you have any comments on this article, for example, you believe that the facts we have reported are incorrect, please let us know through our Twitter account – Direct Message is fine. You can also email us at admin@predatory-publishing.com, but we do not check this email account very regularly so Twitter Direct Message is preferred.
If you have any other suggestions for facts that you would like us to check, then please let us know (using the communication channels mentioned about). We cannot promise to look at every suggestion but we would like to hear from you if you have any suggestions.
We are getting an increasing number of people asking us “Is [insert journal] a legitimate journal?”
Typically, we are sent a journal name, in the hope that we can tell them whether a journal is predatory or not. Our usual response is that we do not have a list of journals that we can simply refer to. That is not a service we offer, indeed, not a service we can offer at the moment, but there are others that do; for example Cabells.
At the present time, we see ourselves more as educators, trying to tell researchers what they should look out for.
In any case, we do not want to be the sole arbiter, deciding whether a journal is predatory or not. This is one of the things that Jeffrey Beall was criticized for. He, and he alone, decided whether a journal should appear on his list and some publishers were upset by this. We have written about this in one of our other articles.
Start by seeing if the journal is a member of COPE and/or DOAJ. You should also check if the journal is registered in Scopus and/or Web of Science. These will not provide a definitive answer as to whether the journal is predatory, but it’s a good start.
Sample Correspondence
Here are examples of typical questions that we get, together with our responses. We have, for obvious reasons, respected the confidentiality of the person who asked question who, we recognize just wants to know if they should submit to the journal in question.
“Could you please check whether the journal called [journal name] is a fake Journal or not? I have already published a paper with them in January 2020, but cannot find it through Google.”
We had a quick look at this journal and it does look predatory, and we told the author that. We followed up this correspondence by writing an article, in which we provide a case study of the journal, which led us to the conclusion that the journal in question is a fake journal, although the evidence trail that led to this conclusion was far from straight forward. Please take a look at the article, it is an interesting read.
“Could you please tell me about the Authenticity of these two Journals if whether they’ are Fake Journals or not? Thank you.” We were provided with images of two journal covers.
In response to this question we asked “What is your view? Have you done any analysis?“, to which the answer was “No. I just ask if you know about them, then please just tell me. I was thinking that you are a group or organisation having database about fake journals.“
We had to say “We don’t have a database, not even for predatory journals, let alone fake journals. We have to look at every journal individually. We will add it to our list of journals to investigate – but it will take time. But you can see the steps we went through from our previous article so if this is urgent, please take a look yourself.“
“Have you checked this journal [journal name]? Would request to hear your verdict on it. Wanted to publish with them and I found some contradicting reviews; some say predatory, others recommend it. So I was looking for an independent objective review.”
Our response was “We do not have time to do a full review, but just had a quick look and we would (personally) avoid. Not least of all as you have to pay 60 USD just to submit, but there are other worrying things. We would look elsewhere. Not saying it is definitely predatory, but erring on the side of caution.“
Education is Important
Rather than trying to be the sole arbiter of whether a journal is predatory (or fake) or not, we are more inclined to help educate people, so that they can come to their own conclusion, and make a decision based on that. We believe that this is much more effective than maintaining yet another white/black list of journals.
Previously, we have made some judgments, which we back up with evidence, but we do not generally just say that a journal is predatory (or not) after just a cursory glance. To be frank, sometimes it is obvious, but we do not believe it is our place to make statements that might be biased, based on too little information or simply drawing an incorrect conclusion.
Another comment we often make, when asked for our view of a journal, is “What is your view?” Many people either fail to respond, or say that they do not know, which is the reason they asked us. That is fine, but if we just give our view that may not be fair on the journal as it is just one view, perhaps, based on limited information. There is a more of a need for education, to inform researchers what to look for when trying to decide if to submit to a journal or not.
Whenever we look at a journal, there are four quick checks that we always carry out.
Is the journal a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)? COPE is a member based service, which publishers and journals can apply to join. If they pass the checks made by COPE than they will be accepted.
Are they listed on the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)? DOAJ maintains a list of open access journals that they have validated. DOAJ did have some issues a few years ago but that is in the past and, in our view, it is now a valuable and reliable resource.
Is the journal in the Scopus bibliographic database? Scopus is one of the recognized bibliographic databases that provides, among other, this impact factors for the journals that they accept. To get accepted by Scopus is a robust process.
Is the journal listed in the Web of Science bibliographic database? The Web of Science database provides a similar service to Scopus. It is arguably more difficult to get accepted by Web of Science than it is to be accepted by Scopus.
If you want more information, below we have linked to some video’s which goes into further detail about COPE, DOAJ, Scopus and Web of Science.
Table 1 shows these journals and whether they are recognized by COPE, DOAJ, Scopus and Web of Science.
[table id=058_001 /]
What if they all say No?
It is IMPORTANT to note that, even if the answer, for a given journal, to each of the questions above is No, this is far from a definitive indication that the journal is either fake or predatory. As an example, if a journal is not an Open Access journal, then DOAJ would not list it. That does not make it a bad journal. It just means that it is not even on the radar of DOAJ and will not be evaluated.
Similarly, not being included in the other three databases we mention is not necessarily a negative.
Therefore, we cannot immediately infer anything about the second and third journal in Table 1 just because they are not members, or recognized, by any of those organizations. It does suggest though that further investigation is required.
But, and it's a big BUT
If the journal does have at least one “Yes” next to it, it starts to build confidence, but you should still carry out additional checks.
This was particularly apparent when we investigated Interciencia Journal. Everything looked fine, and it ticked a few boxes, but it became apparent that it had hijacked the ISSN of a legitimate journal and so, of course, everything looked good, until you dug a little deeper.
We decided to delve a little deeper into the two journals that had some positive indicators in Table 1, just to show you what additional checks you may want to do.
Figure 1: Home page of Humanities and Social Sciences Reviews (accessed, 10 Jan 2021)
Just because a journal says something on its home page, does not necessarily mean that it is telling the truth. You need to double check. Figure 2 shows this check, when we accessed the Scopus web site using the ISSN for Humanities and Social Sciences Reviews.
Figure 2: Checking Humanities & Social Sciences Reviews on Scopus
It is good to see that this appears to check out. Not only does the the ISSN check out, which cannot always be totally trusted as we saw from our previous case study, but the journal name and the publisher also align with the journal’s home page.
More checks should be carried out, but the fact that the journal has been verified as a Scopus journal bodes well.
International Journal of Civil Engineering and Technology (IJCIET)
The International Journal of Civil Engineering and Technology was also found when we searched the Scopus database. Figure 3 shows the journal’s home page. It claims to be recognized by Scopus. That is easy to check, as shown in Figure 4.
Figure 3: Home page of International Journal of Civil Engineering and Technology (accessed, 10 Jan 2021)
Figure 4 shows that the journal is recognized by Scopus. This is good news, but it is worrying that all the various metrics are shown as “N/A”. This needs a little further investigation.
Figure 4: Checking International Journal of Civil Engineering and Technology on Scopus
Clicking on the journal name, leads us to a screen that is shown at the bottom of Figure 4. We have highlighted the important part, with a yellow highlighter, which shows that the journal has been discontinued in Scopus. This is a worry and is deserving of further investigation.
We are not going to carry out a detailed investigation, but we will make a couple of comments, just to show you some of our thought processes.
Looking at Figure 3, there is a box that mentions journal impact, giving a list of impact factors from 2010 to 2020. This looks impressive as the impact factor is increasing and shows that the journal has been publishing for at least 10 years. The issue we would raise is that there are no links on the page and we do not know what impact factor the journal is referring to.
Again, looking at Figure 3, the journal makes reference to the Scope Database. We are not aware of this database so we would suggest that it requires more investigation, just to check on its validity and authenticity. It might be fine, but (personally) we would want to check.
There are some concerns about this journal, despite it being listed by Scopus. This is why, the four checks we suggest in this article should only be the start of your investigation.
Conclusion
We are getting an increasing number of requests to give our view on a given journal. We are not happy to provide a view, without carrying out an extensive, evidence based study. Given the number of alleged predatory journals, that is simply not possible.
We see a need for education so that researchers can arrive at their own conclusion about a journal. In this article we provide four quick checks that we carry out, which anybody can do, especially if you have the ISSN for the journal that you are investigating.
It is important to realize though that these four indicators are just that, indicators, and they should be used as a starting point for further investigations.
We did that for two journals and got very different results. One journal was validated as being an active registered journal with Scopus, while the other was registered with Scopus but its listing has now been discontinued. At first sight the journals look the same, with regard to their Scopus status, but digging a little deeper shows that this is not the case.
As we have said before though, the world is not short of legitimate journals so, if you have any doubts just move onto the next journal on your target list, rather than taking a chance on a journal that you are unsure of.
Publishing a fake paper in a predatory, scientific journal appears to be relatively easy. The example we focus on in this article shows just how easy.
We have published several articles on sting operations against predatory publishers, but we make no apology for highlighting another one. Indeed, we will continue to highlight them whenever we find them.
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.
In this article we primarily focus on the journal and the publisher. We do this as the story behind the paper has already been covered in another article by the author himself.
We are keen to look at the type of journal that publishes a fake scientific paper so that other researchers might be able to draw on some of our insights to decide if a journal is predatory, or perhaps, when planning their own sting operation to expose a predatory journal.
TEDx Talk by Bradley Allf
Since writing this article, we are delighted that Bradley Allf has done a TEDx talk on the paper that we discuss in this article. It’s a great watch and we would encourage you to take a look.
The fake paper
The fake paper was published in “US-China Education Review A.” The full citation of the article is:
Allf B.C., Pinkman J.B. and White W.H. (2020) Experiential Learning in Secondary Education Chemistry Courses: A Significant Life Experiences Framework. US-China Education Review A 10(4):158-164. DOI: 10.17265/2161-623X/2020.04.002
In the rest of this section, we look at some aspects of the paper that we found interesting, if not amusing.
The article’s home page
Figure 1 shows the page that is displayed, when you follow the DOI link.
Figure 1: Publishing a fake paper: Screenshot showing the page that is displayed when you follow the DOI (accessed 28 Nov 2020)
We make the following comments on this web page:
It is interesting that the journal title is not displayed anywhere on the page.
The “Cite this paper” section is not a live link, so we are unable to retrieve an example of how the paper should be cited.
The “References” is not a live link. You need to access the paper to look at the references. This is actually not too much of a hindrance as the paper is open access and we only make the point to highlight the shortcomings of the web site.
Indeed, none of the links on this page are live, including the DOI and the keywords.
The paper’s authors
Many fake papers that are published often have a comedic element to them. We still smile when we think about some of the author names and paper titles that we reported in “Journal publishes a spoof Covid-19 paper“, with regard to their papers that they cited, which were figments of the author’s very active imagination.
For the paper that is the focus of this article, we find it very amusing that the authors, in addition to Bradley Allf, are Jesse B. Pinkman and Walter H. White.
Figure 2: Publishing a fake paper: This paper was co-authored by Jesse B. Pinkman and Walter H. White, who are characters from the TV series Breaking Bad
Jesse Pinkman and Walter White are the two main characters in the TV series Breaking Bad. We hope that Bryan Lee Cranston and Aaron Paul Sturtevant (the actors real names) are impressed that their characters were able to publish a peer reviewed, scientific paper, which is based on the story line of the hit TV series.
Pinkman’s and White’s affiliation is given as “J. P. Wynne High School, Albuquerque, USA“, which is the fictional school from the TV series.
The paper’s “storyline”
For those of you not familiar with the story line of Breaking Bad, it is essentially about a high school chemistry teacher (Walter White) who starts producing drugs to support his family after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. He teams up with his former student (Jesse Pinkman) and they soon become major players in the drugs market due to the high quality drugs that they produce.
The fake paper, as well as having the main characters from Breaking Bad as authors, also draw on the underlying premise of the TV series in the preparation of the paper.
One of the quotes we like from the paper is:
“a largely insignificant aside: the new teaching style was not actually employed in these courses, and was instead taught in an one-on-one basis with a single student, already graduated from the school: JBP; as another insignificant, almost unnecessary-to-state aside, White soon left his post at Wynne HS to pursue his drastic new instructional techniques in a “freelance” capacity.”
This just about sums up one of the main story lines of the Breaking Bad series, or at least explains how the two main characters came to be working together.
There is also “nonsense” in the paper, such as stating that “Albuquerque is part of the Galapagos Islands.” It then goes on to give various geological details, which have no relevance to the main content of the paper. The section in question concludes “The first fossil evidence of humans in Albuquerque is from approximately 109 years ago.” If these are not red flags to any sensible review process, we are not sure what is?
We recommend that you take a look at the paper, especially if you are aware of the plot line of Breaking Bad. You will appreciate the subtleties (perhaps not so subtle) hidden within the paper.
Review and publication timescales
When we look at papers from predatory journals, we are always interested in the times scales. That is, how long did it take to get the first review back and then how long did it take before the paper was published.
Unfortunately, none of this information is available but, if the author is willing to share this, we would be very interested to see it.
The Journal
It is always interesting to take a look at the journal in cases such as this, just to see if we can establish if the journal is legitimate, or not. In this section we take a look at some features of the journal. If you think we have missed anything, let us know and we will update this article.
Just for the sake of record, we have captured the journal’s home page (accessed 28 Nov 2020). We have not put the image on this web site, as it only has limited appeal, but it is available to those that want to view it.
Figure 3: Publishing a fake paper: The “indexing” page of US-China Education Review A, the journal which published the fake paper (accessed 28 Nov 2020)
We note that many of them are not really indexing services, in that they are no mark of quality. For example, listing Google Scholar, Scribd and Sherpa Romeo, although very worthwhile organisations, do not give any guarantee of quality. It is probably not wrong to use the term “indexing” but in the context of an academic journal this term is usually associated with services such as Thomson Reuters and Scopus and the term, to the unwary, would suggest that being indexed by an organisation is somehow a validation of the quality of the journal.
Others are misleading. For example, there is an entry that says “SJournal Index“. There is no link associated with this entry (any of them actually) so if you carry out a Google Search, the top entry is ‘Scientific Journal Rankings – SJR” (see figure 4).
Figure 4: Searching for “SJournal Index”
If the journal is registered with Scimago, this would be an indicator of quality.
However:
Note that the search that was returned is actually for “Journal Index“, not “SJournal Index“.
If you click on the link to search instead for “SJournal Index“, this returns results which point back to David Publishing (see Figure 5). This is a worry and suggests that David Publishing is using “SJournal index” so that, if it is searched, it gives the impression that the journal is recognized by Scimago.
Just to be be certain, we searched the Scimago database, and the journal was not found (the screen shot is here, accessed 28 Nov 2020).
Figure 5: Forcing Google to search for “SJournal index”
We mentioned above that none of the indexing items are live links. We wanted to say a few more words on this point. If the journal wanted to be transparent, then it should provide a link so that the reader can easily validate what the journal is saying, as well as saving the reader the bother of having to carry out the search for themselves and, perhaps, having to interpret the results.
To show how easy this is, we searched a few of the indexing terms and have provided live links in the list below.
Some of them were not valid. For example, Electronic Journals Library (EZB) does not recognize the journal (see the screen shot here).
We also looked at Scribd and could find articles for 2013, but struggled to find other years.
Social Media
Looking at Figure 3, there are some social media platforms mentioned at the bottom left of the home page. We just note that none of these links are active.
We searched some social media platforms but we were unable to find any mention of the journal.
The US-China Education Review A is not a member of DOAJ or COPE.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, but if a journal is a member of DOAJ and/or COPE it can be seen as a positive, but not being a member is not always a negative, but it just gives another piece of the jigsaw and can inform the conclusion we reach about the journal.
Article Processing Charges
We looked for the article processing charges (APC) but struggled to find anything. However, if you look at Figure 6, you will see that the journal has a subscription link (highlighted in yellow). Clicking that that, leads to a page which lists all the journals, giving the “Print” price. We have extracted the part for US-China Education Review A, (shows in the red ellipse) which shows that the price is $600.
Figure 6: Publishing a fake paper: The subscription charges for “US-China Education Review A”, the journal which published the fake paper
This is of the same magnitude that the author reported they were asked to pay. The author was asked to pay $520, which many other journals in the David Publishing Company portfolio, state as the price. It looks like that they have recently increased the price for this journal.
So, although it is listed as a subscription cost, it looks as if this is a APC. This might simply be a mistake but it could be done on purpose to make any authors believe that this is a subscription based journal, rather than an open access journal. It is only when they receive an invoice does it become clear.
Table 1: Journals that are published by David Publishing Company (as at 28 Nov 2020), which includes the journal which published the fake paper.
We have not looked at any of these journals, but we have added the David Publishing Company to our list of publishers that we believe require further investigation.
Read more
The author, Bradley Allf, has written an article about his experiences in writing and publishing this article. A lot of the material we report above is drawn from Bradley’s article but it is still worth a read, as it contains many more details than we have included here, as it is pointless us repeating the same information.
Conclusion
At the time of writing (29 Nov 2020), the article was still available on the journal’s web site. You can access it via it DOI, 10.17265/2161-623X/2020.04.002. But, if the article is removed, we have archived a copy here.
From the experiences reported in this article, we would suggest that you avoid submitting articles to US-China Education Review A. Indeed, we would avoid the journals in the David Publishing Company portfolio.
If you believe that you would like to submit to this journal, or another journal from this publisher’s stable, please carry out your own due diligence and, remember, there are plenty of journals to choose from so if you have any doubts just move onto the next one.
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With your support, it will enable us to deploy some of the ideas that we have, and will also enable us to work more closely together. As an example, we will look at journals and/or publishers that you propose. You can read more here.
We were recently contacted via a direct message on Twitter which 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 document the process we went through to answer this question, using the journal in question as a case study.
How to spot a fake journal?
Check the journal name very carefully. The fake journal may have very subtle differences to the journal they are impersonating. They may even have the same name, which is just another element that you will need to investigate.
Check the URL of the journal. Does it agree with what you might expect to see.
Look at the journal’s home page and investigate all the claims that they make with regard to membership (such as DOAJ and COPE), impact factors and whether they are listed in bibliographic databases such as Scopus and Clarivate.
Do not just rely on the ISSN, as the fake journal may be using the ISSN of the legitimate journal and all the checks you make will validate the journal as legitimate.
Check the journal’s web site, editorial board, previous papers, open access policy etc. Does it look like a legitimate journal?
Try to track down the journal that it is impersonating. This will be your strongest evidence as you can then compare the two.
At first it may seem daunting to try and establish whether a journal is fake, but you only need to find one thing and that will lead to other things and the body of evidence will quickly build up.
In this article, we provide a case study which documents our investigation. Every investigation will be different, but we hope this article provides some ideas as to how you can carry out your own investigation.
Like predatory journals, if you have any doubts, just move onto the next journal. The scientific world is not short of journals that you can submit to.
We will keep the identify of the person who asked the original question confidential (it was a private direct message after all), but will send a link of this article to the person that asked the question by way of a response, which we hope they find useful.
What is a fake journal?
It is important that we understand what we mean by a fake journal, at least for the purposes of this article.
A fake journal represents itself as another journal in the hope that it can get researchers to submit to this fake journal, rather than the researcher submitting their research to the legitimate journal.Invariably they will want to charge for publishing your article, even if the legitimate journal it is impersonating does not have an Article Processing Charge (APC).
Fake journals are different to predatory journals. Predatory journals use the open access model of publishing but have little (or no) peer review, and will accept most (if not all) papers. Fake journals take this one stage further. They are predatory, but also leverage on the good name and reputation of a legitimate journal.
Predatory journals, as are fake journals, are primarily motivated by financial gains. They have no interest in ensuring that the integrity of the scientific archive is maintained.
If you want to read more about this topic, the following articles may be of interest:
As mentioned in the introductory remarks, we received a Twiter direct message which said:
“Hello
Thanks for all your efforts for ridding Scientific Research and Publications from Predatory/fake Journals. Could you please check if the Journal Interciencia Journal is a fake Journal or not?
I have already published a paper with them in [redacted] and I did not yet find it in Google Search.
Regards“
We have redacted the date that the author had published a paper, to further protect their identity.
Initial investigation
Our aim is to ascertain whether Interciencia Journal is a fake journal, or not. First of all we looked through various metrics, organisations – just to see if the journal was listed and recognized by them.
Search for the journal
As you might expect the first thing we did was to search for the journal. The first entry in the search results was a link to a journal, with a URL of http://www.intercienciajournal.com/, which led to the home page shown in Figure 1.
Whether a journal has an ISSN, or not, is no indicator of quality but the ISSN can be used to find out about the journal, as it it is a unique identifier.
Figure 2 shows the result returned from the ISSN portal.
Figure 2: Searching for ISSN 0378-1844 on the ISSN portal
This looks good. At least the ISSN is valid and we can use it in other searches, knowing that the ISSN is recognised.
Using the ISSN (0378-1844), it is easy to find out of a journal is a member of DOAJ. Figure 3 shows the result.
Figure 3: Searching for ISSN 0378-1844 on DOAJ. Three articles are returned, but not journal
The search returned three results, but these are all articles. The expected journal is not returned. This is a red flag, which deserves further investigation. It is not necessarily bad, but it is something to be noted, especially as the journals says that it has been evaluated by DOAJ.
Committee on Publications Effort (COPE)
COPE is an organisation that journals can join, committing them to uphold certain ethical standards with regard to scientific publishing.
Although Interciencia Journal does not claim to be a member of COPE it is often a check we make. If it turns out to be a member, that is a positive. It is not necessarily a negative if it is not a member, but it is worth the ten seconds it takes to check.
Figure 4 shows the result of the search.
Figure 4: Searching for ISSN 0378-1884 being a member of the Committee of Publication Ethics
The result of the search show that ISSN 0378-1844 is not a member of COPE.
Thomson Reuters (ISI)
One of the claims made by Interciencia Journal is that it is indexed by ISI. If you look at Figure 1, you can see where this claim is made. The highlighted area (bottom right of Figure 1) is a clickable URL. If you follow this link, it leads to the screen shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5: Following the Thomson Reuters link on the Interciencia Journal web site
This leads to the Clarivate web site (which is what we would expect) and the ISSN/journal appears. This looks good.
As a secondary check, we also searched Web of Science, from outside of the Interciencia Journal web site and saw the information shown in Figure 6. This confirms that the journal is recognised by Web of Science.
Moreover, it has an impact factor of 0.448 and, for those of you who are interested in these things it has been indexed since 1997 (across two different categories), ranking as Q3 or Q4. Since 2008, when it transferred from the “Multidisciplinary Sciences” category to the “Ecology” category, it has always been Q4 (at least up to 2019, which is the latest figures available when we chanced on 25 Nov 2020).
Figure 6: Verifying that ISSN 0378-1844 is recognised by Web of Science
Scopus
Figure 1 shows that Interciencia Journal is indexed by Scopus. There is no link on the journal’s home page, but it is easy to check whether it is a Scopus recognised journal or not.
We logged into Scopus and searched for the journal. The result is shown in Figure 7.
Figure 7: Validating that ISSN 0378-1844 is listed by Scopus
This confirms that 0378-1844 is recognised by Scopus.
What does this tell us?
After this initial investigation, what do we know.
The ISSN is a valid ISSN and is recognised by the body which looks after ISSN.
The journal is not registered with either DOAJ or COPE
The journal is recognised by Thomson Reuters (Web of Science, ISI or Clarivate; or however you refer to it).
The journal is recognised by Scopus
Given that the journal is recognised by ISI and Scopus, we can forgive it not being a member of DOAJ or COPE and this profile would certainly suggest that we are looking at a legitimate journal and we can go ahead and submit our research paper.
But, and there is a big but ….
The Journal Name
So far we have focussed on the ISSN, as this is a unique identifier and it enables us to check on website sites such as DOAJ, COPE and Scopus a lot more easily that typing the journal name in.
But what about the journal name? We are looking at a journal called Interciencia Journal, but if you look at Figure 2 (ISSN), Figure 5 (Web of Science), Figure 6 (Web of Science) and Figure 7 (Scopus) you might have noticed that the journal name is given as Interciencia. The “Journal” is “missing“.
Is this something we should be concerned about? After all, if somebody told you that the journal was called Interciencia, it would seem reasonable to search for “Interciencia Journal”.
Searching for Interciencia
Rather than searching for “Interciencia Journal“, we searched for “Interciencia“. Figure 8 shows the search page that was returned.
Figure 8: Searching for “Interciencia”, rather than “Interciencia Journal”
When we searched before (for “Interciencia Journal“), the third entry in Figure 8 appeared at the top of the list. When we search for “Interciencia” (without Journal) that entry is now third in the list and there is a new item as the first entry.
Both of these links lead to journals with an ISSN of 0378-1844. You can see this in Figure 1, and Figure 9 shows the page that https://www.interciencia.net/ leads to. We have highlighted the ISSN (0378-1844) shown at the top of the page.
This is a worry as we have found two different home pages, which are using the same ISSN.
Interciencia versus Interciencia Journal
We are now in a position where we have two journals that have (or at least claim to have) the same ISSN. Which journal is the correct one, and which one is the fake one.
The name is the giveaway. One agrees with Scopus, Thomson Reuters and the ISSN portal. That is, Interciencia WITHOUT “Journal”, is the legitimate journal. Interciencia Journal is a fake journal.
Just to be absolutely clear, Interciencia is a legitimate journal and Interciencia Journal is a fake journal, trying to leverage off the success of the legitimate journal.
Observations
Now that we have established that there are two journals with the same ISSN, but one of them is fake, what else can we say?
We make the following observations, noting that this is related to just these two journals. As we say above, any investigation that you carry out will be different but we hope that our observations will give you some idea of areas that you may want to look at.
We have already commented on the Interciencia Journal home page. Most of its information is leveraging on ISSN 0378-1844.
What we have found about ISSN 0378-1844 is largely correct, with the exception of having any association with DOAJ, although it did only say that it was being “evaluated“, not that it was a member of DOAJ.
The key point is that Interciencia Journal is not the journal that has an ISSN of 0378-1844. This ISSN belongs to another, legitimate journal, with a very similar name.
Looking at the “Policies” page for Interciencia Journal (we have provided it here if you want to see it), it states “All papers will be double blind peer reviewed by 2-3 expert reviewers with 2 weeks from the submission time.” In line with many predatory journals, one thing they offer is fast review (and publication) times.
Note: we have not shown some images on this page, but have provided a link to them. This is an attempt to not “clutter up” up this page but to still make the images accessible to those that would like to see them.
Both journals are publishing volume 45 in 2020. In the case of Interciencia Journal you can only access the archive back to 2012 (Volume 37). Strangely Interciencia only goes back to 2009 (Volume 34). We are unsure why you cannot access back to Volume 1?
If you are still not convinced that they are different journals, take a look at the papers published in (say) Volume 45 Issue 10. The paper titles for both journals are totally different.
When we tried to access the papers, the papers in Interciencia are freely available, but Interciencia Journal asks for 2,000 USD to access all of their content (here is a screenshot of the web page).
If you click on this link you are taken to a Knowledge Insights web page, where you can make payment (a screenshot is available here). We have had a quick look at Knowledge Insights. It was not on the original Beall’s List, but is now (22 Nov 2020), marked as “may be predatory“. See https://beallslist.net/ (accessed 22 Nov 2020).
When you look at the papers on Interciencia Journal, you are unable to see who the authors are (unless, we assume, you pay US$ 2,000 and access the full paper). This is not necessarily bad, but is a little strange.
We would like to have checked whether the the paper had been published by the person who contacted us. You might recall, they said “As I have already published a paper with them in [Redacted] and I did not yet find it in Google Search !!!” We don’t have access to the author name, or the paper title, so we are unable to check whether it has actually been published.
The editorial boards of both journals are different. Just so that we have it recorded, here is the editorial board of Interciencia and Interciencia Journal.
If you look at some of text describing the journals, you will find this on Interciencia Journal (screenshot here) web site:
“The journal is dedicated to stimulating scientific and technological research, to its humane use and to the study of the social context in which scientific and technological development occur.“
If you look at the web pages of Interciencia, you will find the following text (screenshot here)
“It is dedicated to stimulate scientific research, its humanitarian use and the study of its social context, specially in Latin America and the Caribbean and to promote communication between the scientific and technological communities of the Americas.“
The two pieces of text are different but you cannot help but notice the similarities.
Interciencia Journal does not provide any information about its Article Processing Charges (APC) but we were informed by the person that originally contacted us that they were required to pay a fee. They were unwilling to tell us how much. Bear in mind that readers also have to pay (US$ 2,000) – see point 6 above.
Interciencia is an open access journal and charges US$225 per published page, as well as offering some concessions. See the screenshot here.
What does Interciencia have to say?
Looking at the legitimate journal’s web site they are aware that others are making use of their name. Figure 10 shows a screenshot from their web site warning of unscrupulous practices.
Note that this is dated 2017, so they have recognized the problem for a number of years.
Figure 10: The warning given on the web site of Interciencia (accessed 22 Nov 2020)
Conclusion
What started off as a simple question led us down a path of discovery. We quickly came to the conclusion that Interciencia Journal was a fake journal, giving it a very similar name to another journal and publishing statistics on its web site which, although true, are related to an ISSN that belongs to the legitimate journal.
The choice of journal name is also part of the con. If you know that the journal is called Interciencia you are quite likely to search for “Interciencia Journal“. However, by doing so, this shows the fake journal at the top of the search results.
There were some warning signs that the authors might have looked for. They could have verified the journal through Thomson Reuters and Scopus, paying special attention to the journal name. They might have also looked at the web site, which looks a little cumbersome and amateurish.
When they received a demand for payment, this should have raised a red flag, as there is nothing on the web site to say that the journal is open access and will charge a publication fee.
It is always useful to look at some of the papers that have been published which does not seem possible for Intercencia Journal, unless you pay $US 2,000, which goes against the principles of open access.
So, the clues were there, but it is so easy to get conned that we can only feel sorry for the authors and we hope that this article helps others not to suffer the same fate.
Acknowledgments
We would like to than the person who raised this issue with us. We have said that we will not publish their name, but we owe a debt of thanks nonetheless.
When somebody refers to an impact factor it is usually taken to mean that it is a measure of how many times articles in a given journal are cited in other journals, or even self-cited. In this article we look at one of these measures, the Global Impact Factor.
In recent years, there has been a proliferation of fake impact factors, which predatory publishers/journals use to try and give their journals a feeling of legitimacy. In the same way that predatory journals try to attract papers from authors, fake impact factors try to attract predatory journals so that the journals can give an illusion of legitimacy.
The Global Impact Factor (GIF) is was introduced a few years ago. This is the impact factor that we focus on in this article, attempting to arrive at a view as to whether it is a fake impact factor, or not?
What is the Global Impact Factor (GIF)? 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 is an Impact Factor?
An impact factor is, in most people’s understanding, a way of measuring how many times articles for a given journal, in a given time frame, have been cited. An impact factor could be calculated as follows:
x = the number of times articles published in a given time period (say 2015-2019) were cited by other (possibly only indexed) journals in a given time period.
y = the total number of papers published in the given time period.
x/y = the Impact Factor for the journal
As an example, if a journal had published 63 (citable) papers between 2015-2019 and they had been cited 171 times in 2020, the journal would have a 2020 impact factor of (171/63) = 2.71. This means that, on average, each paper in that five year period had been cited 2.71 times.
It should be noted that an impact factor, as defined above, is a measure that can only be applied to a journal, not to individual articles.
We note that there are a number of different ways to arrive at a given impact factor but they are usually based on the number of citations that the articles in the journal has attracted.
What is the URL for Global Impact Factor?
When we first tried to access the the Global Impact Factor web site, on the 29 Oct 2020, it was not available. The site returned a few days later, but we record what we saw in Appendix A, just so that we have a record and it may also be useful for others to see how you can look up details of a web site.
If you search for “Global Impact Factor” you will see the web site:
If you search for “Global Impact Factor“, you would expect to see limited results but there are actually an assortment of results, in addition to the GIF web site.
To be honest, we do not understand why a specific journal (when GIF indexes over 3,000 journals) appears so high up the search list when you search for GIF. Anyhow, we thought it was worthy of mention.
Who is Behind Global Impact Factor?
Normally, you would look at the web site to see if there is an “About Us” (or similar) section to look at, but the GIF web site has no such sections. Therefore, it is not apparent from the web site who is behind GIF, how they can be contacted, the individuals involved and whether GIF is supported by any stakeholders, such as publishers.
A wider search, enables us to see the following.
Jalalian 2015 paper
If you look at the following paper:
Jalalian M. (2015) The story of fake impact factor companies and how we detected them. Electronic Physician, 7(2):1069-1072. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.14661/2015.1069-1072.
… it specifically talks about the Global Impact Factor. On the issue of who is behind it, it says:
“The Global Impact Factor (GIF) was among the first fake metrics, and it first appeared on the scene October 24, 2012 by the invisible cybercriminal whom I identified to be Mr. [redacted], using the phone number [redacted] and address [redacted] in the South Asian country [redacted].“
The redactions, are in the paper itself, rather than us making those redactions for this article. It is a shame, but understandable, that the author of that paper decided to redact the name of the person they had identified.
Stef Brezgov blog
Figure 4: Blog post by Stef Brezgov that mentions the Global Impact Factor
We found a blog post from Stef Brezgov, that was published in June 2019. This post has a section on Global Impact Factors and with regard to their location, it says:
“This company provides an address in Australia, but I think it is really from India.“
This does not help us find out who is behind GIF, but it does correspond with the Jalalian, 2015 paper, which mentions a South Asian country.
So …..
We have been trying to trace the name of the person that set up GIF, but have not been able to find anything. We suspect it was in the public domain, but it is now difficult to find out that name now.
If you have more information about who is behind GIF, we would be grateful if you could let us know. We could then use that information as the starting points for further searches.
How does Global Impact Factor Calculate Impact Factors?
The GIF webs site has a specific section on how it calculates its impact factor. There are also others resources we have found that makes comment on this.
Figure 5 (from the GIF web site) shows the way that the impact factor is calculated, with more details being available on the web site.
We make the following observations about the methodology adopted by the Global Impact Factor:
When GIF calculates its impact factors, none of the criteria takes into account the number of times an article is cited, which is what most people would think, when the term impact factor is used.
As far as we can ascertain, the GIF impact factor is subjective. That is, they cannot be verified by an independent observer. For example, if a journal is given an impact factor of 0.581, how is this derived and what contribution do the individual criteria provide to this overall value?
It states (see Figure 3) that the impact factor is calculated “per year“. If we look at individual journals we can see that many of the impact factors are dated 2019, but there are some that have others dates. For example, the “European Journal of Business and Social Sciences” (see Figure 6).
Assuming that the impact factors are (re-)calculated each year, it would be useful to see the previous year’s impact factors as this would provide information to the readers as to whether the journal is improving, or not.
There is a list of reviewers, which appear to be the scholars who make the judgments on each journal.
In the methodology (Figure 5), it says that “Articles are selected from each issue and their quality is judged.” It would be useful to know how the articles are selected, and who makes those selections.
In the same blog post that we referred to above (see Figure 4) it provides a view on how GIF calculates its impact factor.
“It uses experts to make qualitative judgments about each journal, and that’s how the score is calculated.“
and
“It judges journals on things such as layout and technical editing, so it’s really not a measure of impact at all.“
Researchgate question
Figure 7: How GIF calculates its impact factor (from Researchgate), 22 February 2017
In February 2017, somebody posed a question about who was running Global Impact Factor. Figure 7 shows one of the answers in this thread, outlining how GIF calculates its impact factors.
This resonates with the views given by Stef Brezgov who said that it looks things like layout and technical editing are used, which is supported by the GIF web site (see Figure 5).
We decided to invest some time and look at all the journals that were indexed by Global Impact Factor. This was a significant undertaking, given that were almost 3,500 journals.
We thought it was worth collecting this data from the Global Impact Factor web site, for a number of reasons:
It marks a specific point in time. Web sites are constantly changing and being able to reference a known time, with known content, could be useful for a number of reasons.
It provides a benchmark for future studies. Having this data gives us a point of reference that we can compare against at a later date.
We may be able to use this data for other ideas we have in mind, with the most obvious one being a peer reviewed scientific paper. We are not sure what form this will take at the moment, but having the data is a good starting point.
From the Global Impact Factor web site we collected the following data:
The URL where the details of the journal are displayed on the GIF web site.
The journal ISSN
The title of the journal
The URL of the journal
The GIF impact factor
Although it is not provided as part of the GIF web site we also recorded whether the journal is part of COPE and DOAJ. This is discussed in more detail in the next section.
COPE Committee on Publication Ethics): This organisation promotes (to quote from their web site)
“COPE is committed to educating and supporting editors, publishers and those involved in publication ethics with the aim of moving the culture of publishing towards one where ethical practices becomes a normal part of the publishing culture. Our approach is firmly in the direction of influencing through education, resources and support of our members, alongside the fostering of professional debate in the wider community.“
Journals that are members of COPE are required to adhere to their ethical guidelines. If a journal is a member of COPE it is a good indicator that they are a legitimate journal. If a journal is not a member of COPE it does not mean that the journal is predatory, but you may want to carry our further checks.
DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals): This web site maintain a list of open access journals, which they recognise after carrying out a number of checks. This is done in order to try and maintain a list of legitimate open access journals.
If a journal is listed on the DOAJ web site, it is an indicator that the journal is legitimate. The fact that it is not listed on DOAJ does not automatically mean that the journal is predatory, but it is a an indication that you may want to carry out further checks.
One word of caution, if a journal says that it is a member of COPE and/or DOAJ, you are advised to verify this by looking at the COPE/DOAJ web sites, as some journals have been known to use their logos, without actually being members.
Some predatory journals will also say that they adhere to COPE guidelines, without actually being members. They are not being untruthful (although they might not actually adhere to the COPE guidelines), but the unsuspecting author may believe that they are a member of COPE.
For a previous project that we were involved in, we wrote some software that ascertains whether a journal is a member of COPE and/or DOAJ. It is a relatively quick process to work through the 3,337 journals and identify their membership status. We feel that this significantly adds to the quality of the dataset.
Comments
After collecting all the data from the GIF web site, and then enhancing it with the COPE/DAOJ membership information we can make the following comments about the 3,337 journals currently indexed by the Global Impact Factor. This data collection was carried out on 5 Nov 2020.
The GIF web site lists 3,337 journals.
80 (2.40%) of those journals are members of COPE. 3,257 (97.60%) are not.
422 (12.65%) of the journals are members of DOAJ. 2,915 (87.35%) are not.
40 (1.20%) journals are members of both COPE and DOAJ.
106 (3.18%) of the journals are marked as “Pending Evaluation“. That is, they have not yet been given a Global Impact Factor.
A further 95 (2.85%) journals do not have an impact factor listed. That is, this data is just blank.
So, a total of (106+95) = 201 (6.02%) journals do not have an Global Impact Factor listed.
49 (1.47%) of the journals did not have an ISSN listed.
203 (6.08%) journals had the same ISSN as another journal. To be precise 100 journals had two entries for the same ISSN and one ISSN was repeated three times.
With regard to the duplicate ISSN’s, we show two examples in Figures 9 and 10. Figure 9 shows two entries for the same journal (Journal of Physical Education Research), one appearing on page 18 of the search pages and one appearing on page 75. The only difference is the online ISSN that appears in the second entry. Notably the impact factors have the same value (0.765).
Figure 9: The same journal appears twice in the GIF list of journals. The impact factor is the same.
Figure 10 shows another journal (Mathematical and Software Engineering). One entry appears on page 2, the other entry appears on page 51. On this occasion, the impact factors are different (0.663 and 0.454).
Figure 10: The same journal appears twice in the GIF list of journals. The impact factor is NOT the same.
It is worrying that the same journal can appear twice, but data errors do occur. What is more worrying is that the same journal can appear twice and have different impact factors.
Do all the Journals exist that are indexed by Global Impact Factor?
As we carried out our investigation, we did see some URL’s that led to “page not found“. An an example, the journal Journal of Social and Business Studies, is shown on the GIF web site (see Figure 11), showing that it was established in 2004 and it has an impact factor of 0.169.
If you follow the link to the journal itself, that is http://www.sbdcenter.com/jsbs/, it leads to a page that does not exist.
You may think that this is conclusive evidence that the journal does not exist and, perhaps, has never done so.
However, if you look up the journal on the ISSN web site (see Figure 12), you see that a journal of that name, with an ISSN 2303-6044 does (or at least did) exist.
Figure 12: Searching for the ISSN 2303-6044, which that it exists and has the journal name Journal of Social and Business Studies
The journal entry was last updated on 20 Sep 2014 on the ISSN web site, but at least it shows that it was a journal that has an ISSN number.
So, it is not as easy as saying that as the URL on the GIF web site does not work, the journal does not exist. Much more investigation is required to ascertain the true status of the journal.
Are Journals Aware that they are Listed on Global Impact Factor?
This is a difficult question to answer, as it potentially means that we have to contact all the journals or, at a minimum, we need to look at every web site. This is not really practical as it would take a lot of time, not least of as the information about whether a journal is a member of GIF would not be in a same location on every web site.
But we can do a few random checks. We took the top five ranked articles and looked at their web sites to see if they mentioned “GIF” or “Global Impact Factor“. We searched the web sites by inspection and also by searching the web site, limiting the search to just the domain of the journal. For example, if you want to search for “Beall“, but limit that search to the predatory-publishing.com domain, you would use the (Google) search term:
site:predatory-publishing.com Beall
The five top ranked journals are shown in table 1.
Looking at Table 1, we suspect that the top three journals should really have impact factors of 0.675, 0.675 and 0. 425, as they seem very high when compared to the other 1,300+ journals. But, if these are errors in their database, it makes no difference to this analysis as it would be equally valid just to choose five journals at random.
Figure 14 shows the web page for International Research Journal of Multidisciplinary Science &Technology. This shows that it does recognize that it is indexed by GIF and if you click on the area we have circled in red, this will take you to the GIF web site. It is interesting to note that Figure 14 shows the impact factor as 0.415, which resonates with our view that there are some errors in the database, as GIF lists the impact factor as 415.
Only looking at five journals is, of course, not a representative sample, but it does show that some journals do not recognize their association with GIF. They may have just missed this data from their web site but you would assume that if they have bothered registering, they would want to promote this association?
Conclusion
The Global Impact Factor, despite being called an impact factor, does not follow what we would usually expect from this term (i.e. a measure of citations). However, there is no reason why an organisation cannot define an impact factor in whatever way they want, as there is no recognized definition, but when there is a defacto definition, it is slightly strange to go against that trend.
It would be nice to simply say that Global Impact Factor is a fake impact measure, or it is not but it is not quite as easy as that. In some respects, you have to make your own decisions based on the information we have presented, along with carrying out your own investigation.
You might reach the conclusion that it is a fake impact measure and you will not submit to any journals that is lists. But you may be doing the journals an injustice. They may not be aware that GIF is fake and entered into the arrangement with them in all good faith. There is also the possibility that some journals are not even members, but GIF still lists them.
The best advice we can give is to say that if journal is listed on the Global Impact Factor you should proceed with caution. Carry out your own due diligence. You might want to make a start by doing the following:
Check if the journal is a member of COPE and/or DOAJ. Don’t just look at the journal web site. Make sure you check via the COPE/DOAJ web site. As we have said earlier, not being a member of COPE/DOAJ is not conclusive proof that an open acces journal is predatory, but it would suggest that further investigation is worthwhile.
Check is the journal has ever appeared on Beall’s List. This is quite an old resource now, but it might provide further information for you to make an informed choice.
We have written another article that says how we would go about Analysing a Journal. You may want to take a look at that.
By far the best advice we can give though is that if you have ANY doubts about a journal, just move on and find another one. The world is not short of suitable journals for you to submit to.
As far as Global Impact Factor is concerned, we have significant concerns about this impact factor. It is not transparent, it does not include citations and the integrity and correctness of its database is open to question.
We would treat Global Impact Factor with extreme caution and not assume that a journal that it indexes is credible. Further due diligence is required.
Appendix A: Accessing the Global Impact Factor website
When we initially tried to follow to access Global Impact Factor (29 Oct 2020) and then, a few days later, it was available again.
Why was the Global Impact Factor web site not available?
When we initially tried to access GIF, it was not available. Figure 8 shows the message we received. We tried several browsers, on different devices and received (essentially) the same message.
Figure 8: Attempting to access the Global Impact Factor web site (29 Oct 2020)
Figure 9 shows some of the information that was returned.
Figure 9: Looking up globalimpactfactor.com on who.is web site (accessed 29 Oct 2020)
Looking at Figure 9, there are two interesting points.
It looks as if the domain has recently expired (on 23 Oct 2020), which is presumably the reason why we were unable to access the web site (see Figure 1).
The Contact information (towards the bottom of Figure 2) shows that the contact information is hidden behind a privacy screen. To be honest, we are not particularly worried about this. Many web sites do this (ourselves included). It is partly protecting your privacy (else you might have your home address displayed) but also to stop others sending scam email after collecting your email address from the who.is web site.
Access to Global Impact Factor was restored
As we neared the completion of this article, the Global Impact Factor web site suddenly started working again. Look at who.is again (see Figure 10), we can see that the domain now expires on 23 Oct 2021, suggesting that it has been renewed in the past few days, sometimes between 29 Oct 2020 and 01 Nov 2020.
Figure 10: Looking up globalimpactfactor.com on who.is web site (accessed 01 Nov 2020)
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.
When looking back through the scientific record, it often useful to have access to the seminal work. When we write a paper, we always try and note where a particular research area started as we feel that it is important to recognize the pioneers, upon which everything that follows is built upon.
In some of the articles we have written on this site, we have often referred to the open access movement, as this is the movement that predatory publishers and journals rely upon. If you are unsure what open access means, take a look at our article “What is Open Access Publishing? | Is it a good model?“
We assumed that it would be easy to find out which was the first open access journal. In fact, it was not as easy as we thought, but we believe that we have tracked it down.
In this article we let you know how we arrived at that conclusion, but we are more than happy to be corrected, as we would like to be sure that we have the definitive answer to the question posed in this article.
Firstly, we we look at some of the early work on open access, reporting some of the initiatives that were instrumental in the open access movement, with some believing that the open access movement would not be where it is today without these initiatives.
Then we describe how we tracked down, what we believe, to be the first open access journal.
However, this is not a complete history of open access. We’ll save that for another article.
Early References
If you search for either the history of open access publishing or for the first open access journal, there are a number of things that quickly become apparent. These are important milestones in the history of open access, but do not answer the question posed in this article. However, they are worth noting and we briefly discuss them here for completeness.
arXiv
Pronounced archive (the X represents the Greek letter chi), this service was introduced in in August 1991, by Paul Ginsparg. He recognized the need for a central repository for pre-prints of papers, which were then available for others to download. Many see this is one of the key moments in the history of open access, for example see this article on the “History of the Open Access Movement.”
Being 1991, the access methods were initially limited but others were soon added, including FTP in 1991, Gopher in 1992 and the Word Wide Web in 1993. The term e-print was used to describe these articles and that term has remained in use ever since.
ArXiv is still available today. If you take a look at its web site, you can see that it holds getting close to two million articles (we accessed the web site on 25 Oct 2020) and it covers a variety of topics, as can be seen by this quote taken from its web site.
“arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for 1,782,389 scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.“
In our experience, arXiv is used a lot these days for scholars to stake a claim on an idea as they know that to polish a paper, submit it and get the results of peer review can take a lot of time and they would like to have a record of what they were working on.
Putting a paper on arXiv also means that others can cite the paper, which also helps the researcher’s profile and, ultimately, the impact of their research.
One word of caution, when we review papers and see that there are references to arXiv we also note that these papers have not been peer reviewed, so whilst it is okay to cite them now (as part of the peer review process), they should either be replaced with a peer reviewed version in the final, or removed altogether.
SciELO
The aim of SciELO is to help with the scientific communication within developing countries, providing a way for those countries to increase the visibility of their research and make it easier to access their scientific literature.
Originally established in Brazil in 1997, there are now 14 countries in the network (last accessed 25 Oct 2020); these being Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, South Africa, Spain and Uruguay.
“Open access has long emphasized access to scholarly materials. However, open access can also mean access to the means of producing visible and recognized journals. This issue is particularly important in developing and emergent countries. The SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library On-line) project, first started in Brazil and, shortly afterward, in Chile, offers a prime example of how this form of access to publishing was achieved and how open access in the traditional sense was incorporated within it. Open access has allowed more visibility, transparency, and credibility for the SciELO journals that now span over a dozen countries, three continents, and more than 600 titles. Conversely, SciELO incarnates the most successful and impressive example of gold OA, that is, open access based on publishing rather than self-archiving; at the same time, its database acts like an open-access depository.“
This sums up the origins of SciELO, along with its aims and its progress to date. If you want to know more about SciELO, we would recommend that you take a look at this paper.
The First Open Access Journal
As we said in the opening it was not easy to track down the first open access journal and, to be honest, we are still not convinced that we done that. However, below we talk through some of the resources we accessed, along with the conclusion we arrived at.
Open Access Directory: Timeline
There is a really great resource, called the Open Access Directory, which is a set of lists that covers many areas of open access that you might find useful. Of particular interest was a timeline list, especially the page for pre-2000.
New Horizons in Adult Education
Figure 1: Edited screen shot from the Open Access Directory timeline, showing the first journal. Access full page here.
The earliest journal we can see in the Open Access Directory (OAD) timeline is New Horizons in Adult Education. Unfortunately, the link shown on the OAD page no longer works (accessed on 25 Oct 2020). Just for the record, it was trying to access http://www.nova.edu/~aed/newhorizons.html, but that led to a “404” error (i.e page not found).
New Horizons in Adult Education & Human Resource Development
Figure 2: Screen shot after after searching for New Horizons in Adult Education and finding New Horizons in Adult Education& Human Resource Development
We searched for the New Horizons in Adult Education journal and found a journal published by Wiley (see Figure 2), but with a slightly different name (New Horizons in Adult Education & Human Resource Development). It says that it was first published in Fall 1987, which agrees with the date given in Figure 1.
We have also found other evidence that these two journals are the same entity. Much of this evidence is based on the following article we located.
Hugo, Jane and Linda Newell. (1991) New Horizons in Adult Education:The First Five Years (1987-1991)The Public-Access ComputerSystems Review 2(1), 77-90
Here is the evidence that leads us to believe that it is the same journal.
Figure 3: Screenshot from New Horizons in Adult Education& Human Resource Development, showing two articles that are referred to in Hugo, 1991.
As we said above, both journals started publishing in the the Fall of 1987.
In the Hugo, 1991 article, it says that the second editor (1989-1990) of New Horizons in Adult Education was Jane Hugo, who was one of the authors of the article that reviewed the first five years (Hugo, 1991). Whilst not being conclusive evidence, it is suggestive that the two journals are the same, or at lest connected through a former editor.
The first editor (Michael Ehringhaus (1987-1990) is also mentioned in the survey article and we can see this editor appearing in the journal in 1989 (see the left hand side of Figure 3), when writing from the editor’s desk.
The Hugo, 1991 paper mentions a editorial policy that was published in New Horizons in Adult Education. Specifically it says “The editorial policy guidelines, published in the third issue (Fall 1989) of New Horizons …” Looking at the right hand side of Figure 3, you can see that an editorial policy was published in October 1989, with this entry being taken from Wiley’s web site for New Horizons in Adult Education& Human Resource Development.
We believe that this provides conclusive evidence that the journal New Horizons in Adult Education was started in the Fall of 1987 is the same journal that is now named New Horizons in Adult Education& Human Resource Development.
At some point the original journal was acquired by Wiley and, perhaps at the same time, was renamed New Horizons in Adult Education& Human Resource Development. We could dig even deeper and look at the individual articles and work out when the change took place, which would provide even more evidence.
We did not do this as it would take some time, and we feel that the evidence above is conclusive enough for what we require. Moreover, the articles are now behind a firewall so, although the journal may have started out as open access, this is no longer the case and even those papers that were published back as far as the late 80’s, they are still subject to the reader paying (or having some sort of subscription).
We note that this goes against the spirit of open access where, once something is in the public domain, it should remain there. Perhaps, we are missing something but it does seem perverse that a journal which is a candidate for being labelled as the first open accessed journal now sits behind a paywall.
Learned Publishing
We found a very useful resource:
Crawford W. (2002) Free Electronic Refereed Journals: Getting Past the Arc of Enthusiasm. Learned Publishing, 15, 117-123. DOI: 10.1087/09531510252848881
The abstract of this article reads:
“Do free electronic refereed journals represent one viable alternative to overpriced commercial journals? This informal study looked at 104 titles listed in the 1995 Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists (published by the Association of Research Libraries) as being free, journals, and refereed. Taking five years of continuing publication as an initial sign of reasonable longevity (later raised to six years), the record shows reasonable promise. While quite a few early journals succumbed to the ‘arc of enthusiasm’, more than half are still publishing.“
This looked like a good paper to ascertain the first open access journal. Of interest to our discussion is the statement that appears in the body of the paper.
“The Association of Research Libraries’ (ARLs’) Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists for 1995 includes 104 items that appear to be free, refereed, scholarly electronic journals.“
Crawford goes on to say that some journals started before 1995, were typically distributed by email, or other non-web distribution methods. In the rest of the article, Crawford recounts his experiences in tracking down the journals, as far as he could. Of the 104 journals, 86 were available as free and 49 of those were publishing six years after 1995, so still publishing in 2000.
In the context of this article, the most useful part of Crawford’s article is the list of journals that he has been able to track down. This includes when it started publishing.
By inspecting this list (and searching by years, gradually going backwards in time), we can only find one journal that was first published in 1987, with none being found for any earlier years (see Figure 4).
Flora Online
From the above investigations/discussions we have reached the conclusion that Flora Online was the first open access journal. We note that New Horizons in Adult Education also appeared in 1987, but this was in the Fall (October), whereas Flora Online first appeared on 12 January 1987.
We have managed to track down an archive of the journal, which agrees with the entry by Crawford (Figure 4) that it started in January 1987 and was closed down in 1993.
In case you are interested, here are some key facts about this journal.
Flora Online was first published on 12 January 1987.
The last issue was published on 8 November 1993.
The journal was established by Richard H. Zander.
The journal was the first online journal to receive an ISSN number from the Library of Congress: ISSN 0892-9106.
Flora Online published 29 issues, but if you add up the issues shown in Figure 4, it totals 30. Looking at the archive, there seems to be some ambiguity with issue 22, which has an entry for 11 December 1989 and an entry for 5 December 1990.
Conclusion
We have found a journal (Flora Online) that we believe is the first open access journal. It dates back to 12 January 1987. We may be wrong and we would be delighted if somebody would like to correct us.
If we can arrive at an agreement, backed by evidence, of the first open access journal, then we can all cite it, in the knowledge that it is accepted as that by others in the scientific community.
