In a previous article, we reflected on some of the publishers we have looked at, predominantly through our Twitter account.
We noted that when we focused on a particular publisher it was done without really thinking about being consistent between different publishers. We simply drew out some points/observations that we felt were important.
This, we feel, was a fault on our part and is something we plan to put right in the future.
Basic details for a publisher and its journals
There is certain information that is common across all publishers, and its journals. This includes (but is not limited to):
- Where is the publisher based?
- How many journals does the publisher publish?
- Is information presented at a publisher level, or does each journal have its own dedicated web pages?
- Are there common emails that appear to service more than one journal?
- What is the aim/scope of each journal? Is to broad?
- Do the journals publish regularly?
- What is the time from submission to acceptance and publication?
- Are the journals members of organizations such as COPE, DOAJ and OASPA?
- Do the journals have a statement about their peer review process?
- What indexing does each journal claim to have?
- How can they (both publisher and journals) be contacted?
- What are their Article Processing Charges are (if any)? Are they easy to find on the web site?
- Does the quality of the articles published look sufficient for a peer reviewed journal? We note that we would not look at the technical aspects of the paper(s), as we are not qualified in most of the disciplines, but there are things that we can look at, such as grammar, quality of citations etc.
- Is there any plagiarism in the articles that are published?
- Do the journals have an ethics policy?
- Have we received reports of the journals/publisher sending spam emails?
- Do the journals have a verifiable ISSN?
- Is the web site well written, well presented and provides easy access to important information?
- Are the instructions for authors clear and easy to find?
- Who holds the copyright of articles that are published?
- The make up of the editorial board
- … and, we suspect, that there will be many other information points that would be useful to collect for any publisher that we analyze.
So, there is a core set of information that we could collect for any publisher we look at so that there is some consistency in our analysis.
Data Collection
Not all of the information will be available for a given publisher and its journal(s). Even if it is available, it may be too time consuming to collect, but we will collect as much as we can.
We do have some tools that enable us to automate this data collection but even that can be time consuming and is not fool proof. We hope though, that the tools we have at our disposal, will help, rather than relying on a fully manual process.
What we do not have, unfortunately, is a large team that are able to dedicate significant amounts of their time and energy to manually collecting this data.
The output
We plan to disseminate our findings in three ways (perhaps more in the future)
- Our Twitter account will share information as we collect the data.
- We will use our blog to share more extensive information.
- We will compile all the information we find about a given publisher into a single document and make this available to our long standing patrons, and perhaps to other stakeholders who have an interest.
So, what next?
We will revisit the publishers that we have already looked at. These are listed in our previous post. We may take a break from those we have looked at, and start to look at some others first, before returning to them with a more methodical approach.
We have some thoughts on the publishers that we will look at next. We are just completing that list and will share it soon, as well as asking for your suggestions.
How can you help?
We would welcome comments on this article (in fact any article) via our Twitter account.
You may have noticed that we do not enable comments on our blog posts. This is due to the spam that this attracts and also the fact that we would have to moderate those comments and this takes a lot of time and, we know from personal experience, that the author of those comments would like them to appear instantly and, when they do not, it can cause frustration.
You can email us as admin@predatory-publishing.com. We don’t monitor that account on a daily basis, but we do read everything that is sent, even if we do not respond.
We would also ask you to consider supporting us as a patron. It would really help us to continue, and develop, the work that we do.