Publishing spam

This week, my colleague Susan Stepney posted an interesting blog article on the emerging phenomenon of "publishing spam" - unsolicited emails sent to academics in an attempt to flatter them into submitting a paper for publication. Unfortunately, such publications generally come with significant page charges attached. While the notion of page charges is not, in itself, inherently bad (most open access publishing relies on it), problems arise when they are levied by so-called "predatory publishers" - operations set up specifically to harvest fees from sometimes gullible academics (who may be desperate to add papers to their CVs in an attempt to gain tenure, or even gain a first position). The number of such outfits is growing rapidly, and they are discussed in detail here.

Susan was discreet enough to redact the name of the publisher in her case;  I, however, have been contacted several times by the same operation, despite several requests for my address to be removed from their mailing list. I therefore have no qualms about reproducing here the email I've just sent to them. MASAUM appear on the most popular list of predatory publishers, and so I can only conclude that their primary aim is to make money, rather than disseminate good scholarship.

To whom it may concern:

Despite several requests to you to remove my email address from your contact list, you still persist in sending me your academic spam. I am therefore copying this message to members of your "editorial board", in the hope that they will come to realise the precise nature of your operation.

Your messages are unsolicited and unwelcome. No credible organization would garner publications by sending out boiler-plate invitations in the way that you do. It is clear that the only objective of your operation is to gather publication fees from desperate and/or gullible academics. The role of academic editors is to use their contacts in order to solicit submissions. The people you list in your email should be made aware of the fact that associating themselves with MASAUM will do their careers a lot more harm than good; seeing such an editorship on a CV would immediately cause me to call into question a colleague's judgement, since they have clearly not done their homework on the precise nature of your business model. I would encourage them to resign immediately.You are listed in a directory of predatory publishers

http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/

and it is clear that such a listing is well-deserved.

Please do not contact me again. 

Weeknote #46

There's been a bit of a gap since the last weeknote, mainly due to Christmas, followed by the start of term and the usual last-minute rush before a big European Commission funding deadline...

The crush paper I recently published with Pete and Steve has attracted a certain amount of media attention; the story (see the scan to the right) was used as the centrepiece in the campus roundup section of yesterday's Times Higher Education, and we're expecting local newspaper coverage next week. Apart from the obvious high quality of the science and the significant potential impact of the work ;-) I'm convinced that one of the reasons that the story has been given such prominence is that we published the paper in an open-access journal. If the paper had been buried away behind a journal paywall, I'm not sure people would have been so keen to cover it, and anyone who sees the story and searches for the work will be able to read it, whether they're affiliated to a University or not (and not be asked for $30 for the privilege, or whatever the going rate is...) Of course, we had to pay $1,350 to have the paper published (not considered for publication...), but we could have applied for a fee waiver had we been unable to find the money (and reviewers/editors don't know the payment status when they consider papers).

The proof is in the access statistics; the paper was published just over three weeks ago, and it's been viewed over 800 times already. It's been argued that the average number of readers for an academic article is about 5, so this is clearly an improvement!