ISSN – Predatory Journals and Conferences

June 15, 2023July 29, 2023

Get me off Your F*@^ing Mailing List

A paper is accepted, making it obvious the journal is predatory

In 2014 a scientific journal accepted a paper that made it crystal clear that the journal was predatory. The article just repeated the phrase “Get me off your f*@^ing mailing list“, over and over again, and also included the phrase in figures and graphs.

In this article, we look at the paper, its history, as well as looking at the journal in question.

There have been many examples where researchers have submitted nonsense papers to predatory journals, only to have them accepted, usually very quickly. As long as the author pays the Article Processing Charges (APCs) the paper will be published and then be part of the scientific archive, albeit a very grey area of the scientific archive.

Perhaps the most famous of these is a paper that was submitted to the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology in 2014. This paper just repeated the sentence “Get me off your f*@^ing mailing list” and also included the phrase in a figure and a table.

If you want to see the article, it is available here and here.

Note: We have updated this article to remove “profanities” (i.e. the “F” word”) as search engines/SEO do not like it, so we took the decision to replace all occurrences of that word with ‘f*@^ing”.

Update: Since writing this article, we are aware of a peer reviewed paper that has covered this case, looking at how the journal has performed since it was shown to be a predatory journal.

The paper titles "Get me off your f*@^ing mailing list"

In 2005 David Mazières and Eddie Kohle wrote a paper that simply had seven words, repeated. Those words were “Get me off your f*@^ing mailing list“. The paper also contained a figure and a graph (shown here – click on them to expand them), again made up using the same seven words.

They submitted the paper to the 9th World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics conference in protest at the conference’s spamming and poor peer review standards.

In 2014, in response to an email from a predatory publisher, Peter Vamplew sent the paper to the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology.

To his surprise, the paper was rated as “Excellent” by the journal and its reviewers. The acceptance email (PDF), the acceptance letter (PDF) and the review reports (PDF) can be seen by following the links.

When the paper was accepted a USD 150 fee was requested. The authors declined to pay, so that paper was never actually published. In some ways this is a shame, as it would have been interesting to see if the paper actually made it as far as appearing on the journal’s web site.

The fact that a journal could accept such a paper is astonishing. Some of the other stings, at least, had words that could be thought of as a scientific paper, until it was read a little more carefully. The “Get me off your f*@^ing mailing list” paper, even from a cursory glance, is obviously nonsense, that should never have got past desk review, let alone peer review.

Media Coverage for "Get me off your f*@^ing mailing list"

When it became known that the article had been accepted, it received quite a lot of press coverage. This included The Guardian, which reported the case on 25 Nov 2014 [view], and Inside Higher Ed which reported it on 21 Nov 2014 [view].

International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology

The journal that Mazières and Kohle submitted to (albeit via Peter Vamplew) was the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology. This journal was in Beall’s list, which has since closed down, but an archive is available in several places including here.

Membership of COPE

On the journal’s web site (accessed 04 Jan 2020) it states “IJACT follows publication ethics during phases of online publication inline with the guidelines and standards developed by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).” We thought this was a good statement to make, but wondered if the journal is actually a member of COPE, as it is not clear from their statement?

If you search for “International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology” on the COPE web site, the closest match is “International Journal of Advances in Computing and Information Technology“. That journal has an ISSN of 2277-9140, whereas IJACT has an ISSN 2319-7900.

As a sanity check, we also searched the COPE web site for both ISSN’s. 2277-9140 was found but 2319-7900 was not. Therefore, IJACT is not a member of COPE, even though they state they follow COPE’s ethical guidelines and provide a link to the COPE web site. We are unsure why you would mention COPE, if you are not a member, as those that do not check the COPE web site might assume that IJACT is a member of COPE? At best, this is confusing and, at worst, it could be argued that the journal is trying to mislead the scientific community.

ISSN of the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology

We next looked up the journal on the ISSN portal. If you search for 2319-7900 (accessed 04 Jan 2020), you get a message that says “This record corresponds to a suppressed ISSN as the related resource has never been published.“

Looking at the ISSN FAQ (accessed 04 Jan 2020), it says the following about suppressed ISSNs.

From this, it looks as if the ISSN was registered but has since been deleted? Just for completeness we also searched for 2277-9140 (accessed 04 Jan 2020) and this returned, as expected, the “International journal of advances in computing and information technology” (so we know the search functionality works).

The Editorial Team for the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology

We also looked at the Editorial Team (accessed 04 Jan 2020). It is good to see that they all give their affiliations, and many have an email address. This information is often missing on predatory journal web sites.

It is also good to see that many of the editorial board members provide a URL, either to their Google Scholar page or to their home page. Some of the URLs lead to “404’s” (i.e. page not found), but at least many are provided.

We have summarized the Editorial Team in the Appendix below. Of the twenty people listed, ten have provided a URL and ten have provided email addresses. We did not email the editorial team, but we did check their URLs.

Five of them went to a Google Scholar page. The image on the left shows the Editor-in-Chief (clicking on the image will take you to his Google Scholars page)

Four of the URLs did not work and one led to a University course page. So, of the 20 members, only five lead to useful pages (i.e. Google Scholar pages). It would actually be more useful if the URLs led to the institition’s home page so that their affiliation could be checked as well as their credentials to be an editorial board member.

How has the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology performed?

We thought it might be interesting to look at how the journal has performed since it was established in 2012. The graph (click on it to expand) shows the number of papers that the journal has published since its first issue in 2012 through to volume 8 in 2019.

It is noticeable that in the past few years (2017-2019) the number of papers that the journal is publishing has reduced significantly. This could have been due to the fact that they accepted the “Get me off Your F*@^ing Mailing List” paper, which was reported in the media in November 2014, although there was not a significant downturn immediately after this case came to light. What is striking is that through 2018 and 2019, they have only published one or two papers per issue whereas, on average, between 2012 and 2016 the journal published 11 papers per issue.

Final Thoughts

The fact that this journal is still operating amazes us. You would have thought that accepting the “Get me off your f*@^ing mailing list” paper would have forced it to close.

What is perhaps even more amazing is the fact that authors are still sending papers to this journal and, presumably, paying the Article Processing Charges of USD 150.

Perhaps the journal has changed and it is now a reputable journal but there are some worrying points about the web site, in addition the points mentioned above about COPE, the ISSN and the editorial members. For example:

If you click on the “Review Process” link it gives a 404 error, meaning that the web page does not exist.
On the “About this Journal” page it says “Instructions to author are designed in a detailed manner so that rejection of manuscript should be minimize“. This is a strange thing for a reputable journal to say.
The authors are required to assign the copyright to the journal. This is unusual for an Open Access journal where the authors are required to pay to publish.

Given the fact that this journal accepted a paper that is described in this article, and the worries expressed above, we would urge extreme caution for authors who are considering submitting to this journal.

Appendix: IJACT Editorial Team

This appendix lists the editorial team of the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology. It is provided as a historic record and it also supports the analysis that is carried out in this article.

IJACT Editorial Team
Member	URL Result	Institution	EMAIL
Prof. Harish Baraithiya	Google Scholar Page	Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology, India-462003	editor@ijact.org
Dr. Saleh Ali Alomari	Google Scholar Page	Universiti Sains Malaysia && Jadara University	salehalomari2005@yahoo.com
Dr. Abd El-Aziz Ahmed	University page, but person not found	Cairo University	zizoah2003@gmail.com
Dr. Jigar Patel	Links to a Degree Course page, not the person	Kalol Institute of Managemen, India	drjigarvpatel@gmail.com, jignesh_29284@yahoo.com
Dr. Asim Kumar Sen	404 (Page not found)	St. Francis Institute Of Technology, India	asim_sen@linuxmail.org
Dr. G. Rosline Nesa kumari	Google Scholar Page	Saveetha University, India	roseline@saveetha.com
Dr. B. NARASIMHAN	404 (Page not found)	Maharshi Dayanand University, India	naru2000us@yahoo.com
Dr. Anil Kumar	404 (Page not found)	Sam Higginbottom University of Agriculture	anil.mera2002@gmail.com
Dr. Dola Sanjay S	Google Scholar Page	Ramachandra College of Engineering, India	dicedola@gmail.com
Arvind Mewada	Google Scholar Page	MNNIT Allahabad, India	arvindmewada@mnnit.ac.in
Dr. Mokhtar Hamham	Not Supplied	Abdelmalek Essaadi University, Morocco	Not supplied
Dr. Ajay Singh Tomar	Not Supplied	Jiwaji University, India	Not supplied
Dr. Anandaraj SP	Not Supplied	SR Engineering College, India	Not supplied
Dr.T.C. Manjunath	Not Supplied	HKBK College of Engineering, India	Not supplied
Dr.HARDEEP SINGH SAINI	Not Supplied	Indo Global College of Engineering, India	Not supplied
Dr. N. S. Murthy Sarma	Not Supplied	Bonam Venkata Chalamayya Engineeering College, India	Not supplied
Dr. VUDA SREENIVASARAO	Not Supplied	BAHIR DAR UNIVERSITY, Ethiopia	Not supplied
Dr. Dhanamma Shankar Jagli	Not Supplied	V. E. S. Institute of Technology, India	Not supplied
Dr. NARAYAN A. JOSHI	Not Supplied	Institute of Science & Technology for Advanced Studies & Research, India	Not supplied
Dr. R. V. KRISHNAIAH,	Not Supplied	DRK Institute of Science and Technology, India	Not supplied

Article history

Where an article has been updated since first being written, we provide a history of the changes. Why? Why not :-).

The original article was published on 4 January 2020.
The article was updated on 15 June 2023. We removed the profanities. Although we felt they were justified, SEO does not like it so we thought it best that we removed them. We also took the opportunity to update the article a little.

August 15, 2021August 15, 2021

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Cutting to the chase

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Background

Our Predatory Publishing Twitter account has been running for about two years. At the time of writing (15 Aug 2021) we have tweeted almost 21,000 times, ranging from EMAIL snippets from (probably) predatory journals, quotes from papers on predatory publishing, looking at common terms and highlighting journals/publishers that you might want to be wary of. We also use our Twitter account to promote our blog.

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.

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.

July 29, 2021July 29, 2021

How many editors does a journal need? The case of SCIREA

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.

SCIREA is listed on the Stop Predatory Publisher web site.

Data collected for SCIREA journals?

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 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 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.

March 23, 2021March 25, 2021

What is the Committee on Publications Ethics (COPE)?

The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) was established over 20 years ago. COPE educates and supports editors and publishers, aiming to bring about a culture of ethical publishing, which becomes the norm within scientific publishing.

History of COPE?

COPE’s history can be traced back to April 1997, when it was founded by Mike Farthing, Richard Smith and Richard Horton. By 2003 COPE had 90 members.

In 2003 Fiona Godlee became the Chair of COPE. Godlee was appointed the Editor-in-Chief of the prestigious BMJ in 2005, a position she still holds at the time of writing (23 Mar 2021).

By 2006, COPE’s membership had risen to 350, which is the same year it became a charity and Harvey Marcovitch took over as the Chair.

By 2009, the membership had risen to over 3,000. This significant rise, we suspect, is due to the fact that some publishers now signed up all of the journals in their portfolios.

COPE also started producing flowcharts for various workflows. This is something that they still do today and this link shows you all the flowcharts they they currently produce.

As examples, there are flowcharts for “What to do if you suspect plagiarism” (see Figure 1) and “What to do if you suspect fabricated data“, along with many others.

Liz Wager took over as COPE Chair in 2009 and between 2009 and 2012 COPE held its first USA, Australian and Middle East seminar, as well as delivering its first eLearning course. To this day, COPE still has eLearning courses available, which are available to its registered members.

During this period, COPE also released their first retraction guidelines and released their publishers code of conduct. They also employed their first member of staff and published their first newsletter.

Between 2012 and 2017 Ginny Barbour was COPE’s Chair. COPE held their first South American seminar and the first European seminar outside of London. Guidelines of cooperation between research institutions and journals were released, as well as a Code of Conduct, best practices for journal editors and ethical guidelines for peer reviewers.

COPE issued the “COPE Digest: Publication Ethics in Practice“, a newsletter that has been published since 2013.

Between 2017 and 2019 COPE had Co-Chairs (Chris Graf and Geri Pearson). As well as producing, and updating many guidelines and processes, COPE held its first China seminar, produced its first infographic and celebrated its 20th anniversary.

In 2019, Deborah Poff took over as Chair and developed a new strategic plan which included universities being accepted as members. The COPE web site now contains more than 600 cases and DOI’s are assigned to all key COPE resources.

At this time, COPE has more than 12,500 members from 2013 countries.

Deborah Poff’s term as Chair will end in May 2021, when Daniel Kulp will take over.

The information about the history of COPE is largely drawn from their infographic which can be seen here. This page also contains a lot more descriptive information.

Resources available from COPE

COPE provides a number of resources to the general public (by which we mean those who are not members of COPE). COPE has three types of resources available.

Flowcharts

The COPE web site states

“The flowcharts are designed to help editors follow COPE’s Core Practices and implement its advice when faced with cases of suspected misconduct and have been translated into a number of different languages. They can be downloaded individually (English only) or as a complete set.“

At the time of writing COPE had 36 flowcharts available. They can be accessed here.

Guidelines

COPE (at the time of writing) has 12 guideline documents available.

The guidelines cover topics such as “A short guide to ethical editing for new editors” and “Ethical guidelines for peer reviewers“.

Cases

The cases section of the COPE web site is by far the largest of the three types of resources that are available.

If you navigate to this area of the web site, you will find (at the time of writing) that 623 cases are available. Looking at the numbering scheme, it appears that the cases go all the way back to 1997.

These cases are very interesting just to browse through. Doing so provides many insights, even to experienced scholars.

COPE members can submit new cases, where they are seeking advice.

Becoming a member of COPE

Different entities can apply to become a member of COPE, these being (taken from their web site):

Editors of peer-reviewed academic journals;
Companies that publish peer-reviewed academic journals; and
Individuals or companies who are interested in publication ethics and are working in or associated with the publication of peer-reviewed scholarly journals may become an individual or corporate member. Journal editors or publishers are not eligible for individual or corporate membership.

When you apply, you will be assessed against a set of criteria before your membership application is accepted.

Checking for membership of COPE

Anybody is able to check if a journal or publisher is a member of COPE simply by using the search box at the top of their home page. You can type in the name of a journal (either by name or ISSN) or a publisher.

Figure 5 shows an example when we search for the publisher “Taylor and Francis”.

Using our tool

We have developed a tool that enables you to check if a journal is a member of COPE, a member of DOAJ and whether the journal’s ISSN number is recognized. You can do this yourself by going to the individual web sites but the tool we have developed enables you to check these three things at the same time.

An example of the output from our tool is shown in Figure 6 and full details how to use it are available in our article “Check if a journal is recognized by ISSN, COPE or DOAJ“.

Closing remarks

From a predatory publishing point of view, establishing whether a given journal or publisher is a member of COPE is a strong indication that the journal/publisher is legitimate. You may want to carry out additional checks but being a member of COPE should give you a strong steer that the journal you are dealing with is not predatory.

One word of caution, if a journal is not a member of COPE, it does not necessarily mean that the journal is predatory. The journal/publisher may have just decided, for good reasons, that they do not wish to become a member of COPE.

January 31, 2021March 17, 2021

Check if a journal is recognized by ISSN, COPE or DOAJ

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:

ISSN (International Standard Serial Number)
COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics)
DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)

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:

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

ISSN is the body responsible for maintaining the register of all ISSN numbers. If you are unsure what an ISSN is, take a look at our article What is an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number)?

They have their own web site at https://portal.issn.org/.

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.

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)

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.

We have written an article about DOAJ if you want to know more details, see What is the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)?

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).

This is what you need to know

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:

https://predatory-publishing.com/ISSNCheck/?issn=3456-6789

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.

January 10, 2021March 20, 2021

Is this a legitimate journal? How we respond

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.

What can you check?

We have written a number of previous articles on what you can check when trying to decide whether to submit to a particular journal. The case study we did, we think, will be useful in this regards. You might also want to take a look at “Three quick was to spot a predatory journal” and “Analysing a journal: An Example“.

Four quick checks

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.

Testing it out

We thought we would take a look at the journals we were asked about using the above four criteria. We have not included Interciencia Journal as this is fully discussed in the article that looked specifically at that journal.

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.

Humanities & Social Sciences Research

On its home page Humanities & Social Sciences Reviews claims that it is listed in Scopus (see Figure 1).

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.

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 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.

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.

November 24, 2020March 20, 2021

How to spot a fake journal | A case study

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:

What started the investigation?

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.

Figure 1: Home page of **Interciencia Journal**, accessed 22 Nov 2020

From this home page we note that (see the blue highlights):

The journal has an ISSN (0378-1844).
It says that some of the source data comes from “Thomson Reuters Citation Data“. This is encouraging.
It says it is indexed in the “Science Citation Index Expanded“. This is good to see.
It says it is indexed in Scopus, again good to see.
It says that is has been evaluated by the Directory of Open Access Journals. Not sure what “been evaluated” means.
It has a link to the Thomson Reuters ISI Index page. This is a good sign

This what we would expect to see for a high quality, open access journal. So let’s take a closer look at these some of these to verify them.

ISSN

If you want to read more about ISSN’s, take a look at our article “What is an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number)?” where we go into more depth about what they are.

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.

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

The Directory of Open Access Journals maintains a list (via a membership scheme) of legitimate open access journals. If you want to know more about DOAJ, take a look at the article we we wrote on this organisation.

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.

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.

The first item has a URL of https://www.interciencia.net/, and the third entry has a URL of https://intercienciajournal.com/.

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?
Here are the screenshots of the relevant pages.
Archive for Interciencia (taken 22 Nov 2020)
Archive for Interciencia Journal (taken 22 Nov 2020)
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.
Header image: https://www.pxfuel.com/en/free-photo-qztso

October 26, 2020July 12, 2022

What was the First Open Access Journal?

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.

The following is the abstract from:

Packer A. L. (2009) The SciELO Open Access: A Gold Way from the South, Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 39(3), 111-126

“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 Computer Systems Review 2(1), 77-90

This article is freely available from https://uh-ir.tdl.org/handle/10657/5149, but we have also made a copy available from this link.

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.

September 16, 2020March 20, 2021

What is an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number)?

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As scholars, who publish scientific papers, we often hear the term “ISSN”, but what does it mean, do you need one, how do you get one and what assumptions can you make about an ISSN? In this article, we explore these questions.

An ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) uniquely identifies all types of print and electronic media, such as scientific journals, magazines and newspapers. It is important that it is a periodical. An ISSN is represented by an eight-digit code, often separated in the middle by a hyphen. The digits that make up the ISSN have no meaning in themselves, they just have to be unique from all other ISSNs.

Why do ISSNs exist?

In many aspects of life, we need to be able to uniquely identify something. This might be to identify you as a customer for (say) an electricity provider, for the tax office or as a member of an organisation.

It is not just individuals that need to be identified. In a warehouse each item will have an SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) and in a shop each item will have a Product Code. Even airports have a unique three-digit code so that we can differentiate one airport from another, which is very important for many areas of airport operations, not least of all making sure that our baggage gets to the right place.

Scientific publishing is no different. We have to have a way of uniquely identifying certain elements within this area of our lives. DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is one aspect, which provides a unique way to identify a paper. An ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) identifier is a way to uniquely identify a single author.

An ISSN is just another form of unique identifier, in this case it identifies some form of electronic or print media. In the context of this article, an ISSN identifies a scientific journal.

Just to be clear, an ISSN will be unique to a specific journal. It is not unknown for two journals to have the same name, or almost the same name, which is a tactic used by some predatory journals to try and trick researchers into submitting their journal. However, two journals cannot have the same ISSN; each one will be different.

The ISSN system

The ISSN system is managed by an international centre in Paris. They take responsibility for assigning ISSNs in France and also for countries that do not have their own national centre.

There is a network of more than 80 centres across the world who take responsibility for assigning ISSN’s in their respective countries.

Is there an ISSN standard?

The ISO (International Organization for Standardization, yes, we know the acronym does not match the wording) has a standard on ISSN (ISO 3297:2017) which provides a definition of an ISSN, namely “Each International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) is a unique identifier for a specific serial or other continuing resource in a defined medium.“

Does a journal need an ISSN?

No, a journal does not need an ISSN.

It is perfectly okay to publish a journal, and many do, without an ISSN. This does not mean that the journal is better or worse than a journal with an ISSN, although some will try to give the impression that a journal with an ISSN has some mark of quality about it.

On the ISSN web site, it specifically says “ [an ISSN] does not guarantee the quality or validity of the contents” (see image below).

Why would you apply for an ISSN?

Having an ISSN does provide some credibility to your publication, even if that is unwarranted as ISSNs are relatively easy to get and are no measure of quality. But having an ISSN does provide a unique identifier, which may help others when searching for your publication.

As ISSN’s are for publications that are produced regularly, it also helps tie them together, so that readers know that they are reading the same periodical.

How much does an ISSN cost?

ISSNs are free, at least for the countries we look at. This is different to ISBNs (International Standard Book Number), which have a charge.

This would seem to be another good reason to get an ISSN. As they are free, there does not seem to be a downside?

What are the guidelines for requesting an ISSN?

Each country has its own guidelines but the ones we looked at are similar in the advice they offer.

You can see the guidelines produced by India at this link, but we have downloaded and made it available from this link, just in case the links stops working.

Some of the common guidelines we saw include:

ISSNs are available at no charge.

An ISSN can be revoked if it is shown that misleading information was provided at the time it was requested.

ISSNs are assigned for certain categories of print/electronic media, including serials, journals and magazines. The ISO (International Organization for Standardization) provides some information about what types of material are suitable for an ISSN. They say that “ISSN are applicable to serials and to other continuing resources, whether past, present or to be published or produced in the foreseeable future, whatever the medium of publication or production.”

Books cannot be assigned an ISSN. They require and ISBN.

In some cases you can apply for an ISSN before publication but the general rule seems to be that you either need to wait until you have proof of publication or the ISSN will not be formally assigned until you have proof that the publication exists, even if you have previously applied and have been assigned an ISSN.

For online publications, an ISSN can only be assigned after the first issue has been released.

The guidelines on journals are particularly interesting. In India, for example (but other countries have similar guidelines), they have these guidelines.
- There should be a minimum of five editorial board members.
- Official postal and email addresses should be provided. The emails should have an institutional domain and personal email addresses (such as Yahoo and Gmail) should be avoided.
- The editorial board should be international in its make-up, with some members being from respected institutions from overseas.
- An ISSN can be withdrawn if plagiarism is detected.
- For non-annual e-journals, five articles is the minimum for a complete issue. Annual publications require ten articles for a complete issue.
- Editorial board members should be senior faculty members. Students, research fellows etc. should be avoided.
- The name and complete postal address (specifically India) of the publisher must be displayed on the publication or publication website. It is particularly important for the name of the publisher and the place of publication to be printed or displayed on the serial.

It should be noted that these guidelines apply to an application for an ISSN. Whether breaching these guidelines after the ISSN has been assigned will lead to it being revoked, we are unsure.

How do you apply for an ISSN?

It is relatively easy to get, or at least apply for, an ISSN, but it does depend on what country you are in.

If you look at the ISSN web site, specifically the area on “Requesting an ISSN”, you will be asked to provide your country. This will then link you to the country agent(s), typically with a “Contact Us” button and a “Submit Your Request” button.

At the time of writing, the UK page asked for a form to be filled in, which has to be sent to British Library. In fact, you can access this form through the ISSN web site, but you can access a similar form through the British Library itself.

If we look at another country, let’s say Australia, you will be routed to their page. This also leads to a form that has to be submitted.

So, the exact method of applying for an ISSN will different from country to country but from looking at various countries it appears to be a pretty simple, straight forward process and they generally ask for similar information.

What do the eights digits mean?

An ISSN is made up of eight digits, which are all numbers, although the last digit can be an ‘X’. This last digit is actually calculated from the other seven digits.

The numbers in an ISSN have no meaning. This is different to an ISBN, where each part of the 13 digits has a meaning, or a DOI, where the first part represents the organisation that requested it. Our article has more details.

The only digit that has a meaning is the last one. This is known as a check digit and its role is to ensure the integrity of the other seven digits. This means that if one of the other seven digits changes, or the check digit changes, then it can be shown that there is an error in the ISSN number.

If you want to know how the check digit is calculated, the Library of Congress has an explanation.

What is ISSN-L?

You may see the term ISSN-L, which refers to a “linking ISSN”. This is a type of ISSN that groups together different media formats of the same serial publication.

We have not seen linking ISSNs used very often. In our experience, it is more common to see a journal with a print ISSN and a separate electronic ISSN.

Displaying or printing the ISSN

The standard way to display (or print) an ISSN is:

ISSN followed by a space
The first for digits
A hyphen
The last four digits

For example, (without the quotes when displaying/printing), “ISSN 1476-4687”, which is the ISSN for the journal Nature.

Conclusion

ISSN’s are probably more applicable to publishers than they are to authors and, as an author, ISSNs can almost be ignored.

For publishers, it might be important to have an ISSN, as it provides the rest of the world some way of uniquely identifying your publication. An ISSN also comes with some credibility, even though that might not be justified.

As an author, you may not ever care about ISSNs. It may become important when you are trying to track down a specific journal. Certainly, for this web site, ISSNs are important as it can enable us to differentiate between journals, which is not always as easy as it sounds. To give another example, we have also used ISSN’s in our bibliographic databases as a way to group the same journals together as, even for the same journal, they are sometimes spelt differently.

Most people reading this article will never need to apply for an ISSN but, if you do, it is a pretty easy process and it is free.

April 11, 2020March 14, 2021

Is the African Quality Centre for Journals reliable?

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We look at the African Quality Centre for Journals (AQCJ) and consider whether it can be used as a reliable way to measure the quality of a journal. Our conclusion is that you cannot. There are several issues with AQCJ which we explore in this article.

Most people will have heard of impact factors, which measures the number of times that the papers in a journal has been cited. It is trying to measure how much impact the journal is having on the basis that if other scholars are citing papers from the journal, those papers are more useful than those that receive fewer citations.

Web of Science and Scopus are probably the most trusted impact factors and when people refer to an impact factor, they are likely, without any other context, referring to one of these, most likely Web of Science, more commonly referred to as ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) but is now more correctly called the Clarivate Analytics Impact Factor.

How many journals are indexed?

AQCJ has indexed 985 journals, split into five categories (see Table 1).

Table 1: Number of journals indexed by AQCJ (collected 10 Apr 2020)
Category	#
Engineering	241
Humanities and Social Science	188
Medical and Health	133
Pharmacy	208
Miscellaneous	215
TOTAL	985

Motivation for AQCJ

The home page of AQCJ says “The academic community has long been demanding more transparency, choice and accuracy in journal assessment. Currently, the majority of academic output is evaluated based on a single ranking of journal impact. African Quality centre for Journals (AQCJ) perform this job as precisely as possible.”

We would question the statement that the academic community has long been demanding more transparency, or at least we are not aware of this. We would be happy to accept this if AQCJ could provide something to support this statement.

We agree that the majority, which we take to mean Web of Science andor Scopus, of academic output is evaluated based on a single ranking of a journal impact. What is not mentioned is that to get listed by Web of Science or Scopus requires meeting many of the criteria that are also listed by AQCJ, for example the frequency of publication and the quality of the editorial board. As far as we are aware, Web of Science and Scopus do have one measure (impact factor, measured by citations), but to get to the point where you can be listed by Web of Science and/or Scopus there are significant hurdles to overcome.

We are happy to note that AQCJ state that they will perform this as precisely as possible, which we take to mean that the evaluation methodology will be both exacting and transparent. However, as you’ll see below, this is not really done.

Evaluation Methodology

Below is the evaluation methodology as shown of the AQCJ web site:

Citation: The impact factor for a journal is calculated based on a three-year period, and can be considered to be the average number of times published papers are cited up to two years after publication.

Originality: AQCJ checks random selects published article’s originality and quality. Only citation is not perfect way of Impact factor calculation.

Time publication: Periodicity of publication should be uniform. If it is not uniform, the quality of particular publication cannot impressible.

Geographical coverage: Only particular small area based publication cannot get good marks as it is not covering all around world research.

Editorial Quality: Editor Board of particular Journal gives the direction to any Journal. So it must be good and considerable for evaluation.

As measures of quality, using citations, originality, timing of publication, geographical coverage and editorial quality are laudable. It is how they are measured, the weighting given to each term and whether it can be understood and reproduced by the wider community that is important.

However, we cannot find anything on the web site that says how these factors feed into the overall impact factor that is assigned to a given journal. There are, for example, no worked examples, no formulas, nothing to say how each of the criteria is weighted, nothing to say how subjective views (such as the global reach, quality of the editorial board are converted into a number that makes up the final impact factor.

As an example, the top-rated Engineering journal, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence has an AQCJ impact factor of 12.685. We were unable to find how this figure is calculated. We just have to to accept that this is a valid impact factor, which has been calculated using the five criteria given above. Given that the impact factor is given to three decimal places, suggests that the calculation is quite detailed, which would lend itself to being described in a little more detail.

By comparison, if you look at the same journal on Web of Science, looking at the Journal Citation Report. It is explicitly stated how the impact factor is calculated. Figure 1 shows how this calculation is made.

It is difficult to see how the impact factors assigned to journals by AQCJ can be reproduced and we have to take the figures they provide as a matter of faith.

Attention to detail

As we were writing this article, we noticed a few things that suggests that ACQJ has not really paid the attention to detail that we would expect from an organisation that says on its home page that it will “perform this job as precisely as possible”. Here we just a few examples.

English

The English, as written, is understandable, but there are many areas where it could be improved, as well as some parts which are not totally clear, with us putting our own interpretation on it. As an example, in the evaluation methodology it says “Only citation is not perfect way of Impact factor calculation”. This is understandable, but it could be phrased a lot more clearly. In the originality section of the evaluation methodology (see above) it says “AQCJ checks random selects published article’s originality and quality”. Not only is this difficult to understand, but it is also opaque in its meaning.

We also note that sometimes ‘centre’ in African Quality Centre for Journals is capitalized, and sometimes not. Only a minor detail but again it brings into question the attention to detail and the academic rigor that underpins AQCJ.

Table Headings

If you look at Figure 2, you will see that one of the table headings misspells Factor (as Fcator). This might seem to be nit picking, but it is this attention to detail, and rigor, that we except, and deserve, in the scientific community as it casts doubt over other aspects of the operation.

Repetitive entries

Looking at Figure 2 we note that same journal (IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology) has been shown twice, once at position 25 and once at position 29. Moreover, they have different impact factors.

This really does raise a red flag about the robustness of the evaluation methodology. It is difficult to understand why a journal has been repeated but even if we take this is as a genuine mistake, how does the same journal end up with a different impact factor, especially when AQCJ claims that it “performs this job as precisely as possible”. It makes you wonder what checks and balances are in place to allow this sort of error to get all the way through to the web site.

Incorrect ISSNs

We have not been able to check all of the 985 journals indexed by AQCJ. We would love to, but it is too labor intensive. However, we did check a few random journals and their ISSNs.

We found an error with the Journal Physical Education and Sport. On the AQCJ web site (see Figure 3) it says the journal has an ISSN of 2006-2483. In fact, this is the ISSN that the journal had up to about 2008, when it got a new ISSN, actually three (see Figure 4), that are shown in the figure. We also validated this ISSN with Scopus (see Figure 5).

Latest news

There is a scrolling news feed on the AQCJ web site. All of the news items are dated 2013, suggesting that news feed has not been updated for about seven years. One of the news items (see Figure 6) says that the AQCJ international board will be announced on 25 November 2013. We could find nothing on the web site where this board is listed.

Conclusion

Given what we have said above, we do not believe that AQCJ impact factor is a reliable source of information for scholars.

One of the most worrying points is that that evaluation methodology is not clear, it is not reproducible and we can have no confidence in how the impact factor was derived.

The other worrying point is the lack of rigour, both in the levels of English and the data itself. We have found several anomalies, which suggests that those managing the web site do not have the relevant checks and balances in place and are not applying academic rigor which is so important when supporting the scientific archive.

In conclusion, the African Quality Centre for Journals is not a reliable source of information and its impact factors have no meaning.

A paper is accepted, making it obvious the journal is predatory

The paper titles "Get me off your f*@^ing mailing list"

Media Coverage for "Get me off your f*@^ing mailing list"

International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology

Membership of COPE

ISSN of the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology​

The Editorial Team for the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology​

How has the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology​ performed?

Final Thoughts

Appendix: IJACT Editorial Team

Article history

Cutting to the chase

Background

Thank you

Controversy

"Can you help/advise me, or do you have a view?"

What are our plans?

Become a Patron

1. Supporter

2. Contributor

3. Journal Review

4. Publisher Review

5. Multiple Journal Reviews

6. Multiple Publisher Reviews

7. Premium Supporter

"I can't provide financial support at the moment"

Who are SCIREA?

Data collected for SCIREA journals?

SCIREA: Number of Editors by Journal

SCIREA: Number of Articles by Journal

How many papers does an editor handle?

Final Remarks

History of COPE?

Resources available from COPE

Flowcharts

Guidelines

Cases

Becoming a member of COPE

Checking for membership of COPE

Using our tool

Closing remarks

Why would you want to check a journal's membership?

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

Committee on Publications Ethics (COPE)

Directory of Open Access Journals

How do you check a journal?

This is what you need to know

Summary

Sample Correspondence

Education is Important

What can you check?

Four quick checks

Testing it out

What if they all say No?

But, and it's a big BUT

Humanities & Social Sciences Research

International Journal of Civil Engineering and Technology (IJCIET)

Conclusion

What is a fake journal?

What started the investigation?

Initial investigation

What does this tell us?

The Journal Name

Searching for Interciencia

Interciencia versus Interciencia Journal

Observations

What does Interciencia have to say?

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Early References

arXiv

SciELO

The First Open Access Journal

Open Access Directory: Timeline

New Horizons in Adult Education

New Horizons in Adult Education & Human Resource Development

Learned Publishing

Flora Online

Conclusion

Why do ISSNs exist?

ISSN of the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology

The Editorial Team for the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology

How has the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology performed?