Below is the latest soliciting email I've received. In the absence of Beall's list, I
thought it would be worth sharing some general remarks about why some journals can
come across as questionable, and what to bear in mind as a general rule when thinking
about your submissions.
Some things that ring alarm bells in the email below:
- It's clearly a cut-paste email just including the title of a conference paper I had
online.
- The Editor-in-Chief is given a name, Man-Sik Lee, but not a university affiliation.
- The journal website www.hrpub.org/journals/jour_guidelines.php?id=93 does give
Man-Sik Lee's affiliation, 'Gachon University, Korea', but a site-specific Google
search of that university's website brings up only three results, none of which is a
staff profile: https://goo.gl/j3i91t.
- The domain in the email address, horizon-publishing.org, is different from the
website. That's not necessarily suspect, but going to www.horizon-publishing.org in a
web browser just brings up a domain holding page. This seems sloppy. If you're going
to use a different domain for your email addresses, at least get the URL to redirect
to your actual website.
- The journal web page seems neat and clearly arranged, but the online submission
system does not use a secure HTTPS login page.
Now, I have *nothing* to say about whether this journal is legitimate or not, but at
best it comes across as poorly run and lacking in credentials. Any researcher,
especially at an early career stage, should be aiming for journals that have very
easily verifiable credentials and do not come across as questionable at all.
More generally, the most important opinion comes from the people you want to impress.
Are you seeking academic work and want to impress prospective employers? If so then
ask senior academics who sit on appointment committees what they would make of a
given journal. Are you looking for work in a particular professional sector?
Similarly, ask senior people in that field who decide on appointments whether a given
journal would impress them.
JUST REMEMBER, once you publish a set of data and/or analysis in one journal, it's
TRAPPED there. In most cases, copyright means you can't take the same work (or work
derived from the same data) elsewhere. Even without copyright concerns, prestigious
journals simply don't want stuff that's been published elsewhere. They want
exclusivity. That's the biggest reason for caution here, much more important
long-term than just being scammed out of some money for bogus publishing fees.
The soliciting email is as follows:
=================================
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: The publication for your paper in Linguistics and Literature Studies, Vol5
No3 (ISSN: 2331-6438)
Date: 24/01/2017 23:32
From: Nicholas Wilson, <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Dear Dr. Dave Sayers,
Linguistics and Literature Studies(Editor-in-Chief: Prof. Man-Sik Lee) is an
international, open access, peer reviewed journal. Till now, 5 volumes including 24
issues have been published. This journal has been indexed by some bibliographic
databases (e.g. Linguistics Abstracts Online, ProQuest, Index Copernicus, EBSCO
A-to-Z etc). We read the abstract of your article entitled Reviving 'applied
sociolinguistics and are very interested in your article presented in 2016 Sheffield
Hallam University Conference on Languages and Culturesin 21st-Century
Transnationality. If the full text was not published, please send us an extended
version for publication in Linguistics and Literature Studies(ISSN: 2331-6438) via
email at [log in to unmask]
For more information, please visit journal's homepage.
Guidelines: www.hrpub.org/journals/jour_guidelines.php?id=93
Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions.
Look forward to hearing from you soon.
Best Regards
Nicholas Wilson
Editorial Assistant
[log in to unmask]
Editorial Board of Linguistics and Literature Studies
=================================
Be safe out there folks!
Dave
--
Dr. Dave Sayers, ORCID no. 0000-0003-1124-7132
Senior Lecturer, Dept Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University | www.shu.ac.uk
Honorary Research Fellow, Cardiff University & WISERD | www.wiserd.ac.uk
[log in to unmask] | http://shu.academia.edu/DaveSayers
On 19/01/2017 12:43, Dave Sayers wrote:
> As if I cursed it with my email, sadly this excellent resource has just folded -
> apparently under legal pressure: https://goo.gl/1i2HP7.
>
> As the top comment points out, the website has been cached elsewhere and the latest
> version (15 Jan) is available on the Internet Archive, here: https://goo.gl/HannC1.
> Of course it won't be updated though, and with predatory journals being such a
> rapidly growing field, it will be of increasingly limited value, sadly.
>
> As another comment points out, you can approach the question of legitimacy from the
> other direction and see if a journal is recognised in a directory like DOAJ or SCOPUS
> - although as Beall noted on a number of occasions, these have had to remove
> publishers for misconduct, so membership there doesn't guarantee legitimacy.
>
> For what it's worth, my basic advice is that the right journal/conference will not
> come to you; they will wait for you to come to them. Predatory journals seem to have
> in common the trait of soliciting for contributions, usually out of the blue, often
> with vaguely worded obsequious praise for your work. All these things should ring
> loud alarm bells. This advice is easier to impart than Beall's list, and hopefully
> less likely to get me sued. Please pass it on!
>
> Dave
>
> --
> Dr. Dave Sayers, ORCID no. 0000-0003-1124-7132
> Senior Lecturer, Dept Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University | www.shu.ac.uk
> Honorary Research Fellow, Cardiff University & WISERD | www.wiserd.ac.uk
> [log in to unmask] | http://shu.academia.edu/DaveSayers
>
>
>
>
> On 03/01/2017 19:08, Dave Sayers wrote:
>> Today (3 Jan) saw the release of the latest edition of this excellent free resource,
>> on the website 'Scholarly Open Access', maintained voluntarily by Jeffrey Beall, a
>> librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver: https://goo.gl/qk2o6W.
>>
>> The issue of fraud in academic publishing recently made the mainstream news in a New
>> York Times article which has been doing the rounds: https://goo.gl/A1G9jI. (Beall is
>> quoted in that article.) The rapid increase in fake or otherwise shady publishers is
>> alarming and a cause for heightened wariness, especially rise of 'hijacked'
>> publications as noted on scholarlyoa.com.
>>
>> I would add that there's some debate out there about Beall's methods - particularly
>> concerns about proficiency in English sometimes being a factor in determining the
>> authenticity of a journal. This can potentially cast doubt on journals in countries
>> with distinct varieties of English, somewhat unfairly. (The varied debate about his
>> methods is captured quite nicely within Beall's Wikipedia entry:
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Beall.) Amusingly on that note, the NYT article
>> linked above ends with a correction about a typo in another article!
>>
>> Anyway, in the main, scholarlyoa.com is a very useful resource to help piece together
>> the authenticity or otherwise of a publisher/publication, and this year's updated
>> List is an essential resource - albeit with the above caveats.
>>
>> And please, as with so many of these things, if you find it useful yourself then tell
>> your grad students and junior colleagues! Too many inexperienced folks get duped by
>> obsequious emails from predatory publishers, and they're typically the worst affected
>> by the scams, both financially and because usually once you publish with one journal
>> you can't publish the same data with another (legitimate) journal.
>>
>> Happy new year all, stay safe out there!
>>
>> Dave
>>
>> --
>> Dr. Dave Sayers, ORCID no. 0000-0003-1124-7132
>> Senior Lecturer, Dept Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University | www.shu.ac.uk
>> Honorary Research Fellow, Cardiff University & WISERD | www.wiserd.ac.uk
>> [log in to unmask] | http://shu.academia.edu/DaveSayers
>>
---
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