Relating to a previous post on academic spam it seems the spammers from inTech now have competition in the open access “book chapter” business.
I just received the following email:
Dear Per Ola Kristensson,
On behalf of iConcept Press, I would like to invite you to submit a paper
to our new book project under the working title “Handbook of Pattern
Recognition: Methods and Application”. The editor of this book is Khalid
Hosny. The book description can be found at:
http://www.iconceptpress.com/01/site/publication.viewPapers.php?publicationID=BK020AWe notice that you have some publications related to this book project. For
instance, we are interested in your paper entitled “Parakeet: a
demonstration of speech recognition on a mobile touch-screen device
(2009)”. (Please note that we are not asking you to republish this paper).
You are welcome to submit an extended/expanded version of this paper, or
any work that is related to this book. We expect each chapter has a minimum
of 16 pages.All iConcept Press books are published as hard copy with ISBN and as open
access. For more information, please visit our web site:
http://www.iconceptpress.com.Since we are open access, we would like to ask our authors to contribute
part of the publication expense. This publication fee might be
waived/reduced if: Most authors are from countries that are not classified
as high-income economies
(http://www.iconceptpress.com/01/site/info.lowIncomeCountries.php). Please
contact us for more information. The standard publication fee for each
accepted manuscript is USD$38/page for the first 16 pages and USD$18/page
thereafter. The corresponding author of each paid chapter will receive one
hard copy for free.I sincerely hope that you would accept the invitation and that you support
the open access idea.Next step:
1. Please inform us about your decision via email by: 18 Oct 2011
2. Submit a tentative abstract and title via our online submission system
(http://www.iconceptpress.com/01/site/process.register.php) by: 10 Nov
2011
3. Upload a full chapter by: 15 Jan 2012Please free feel to contact us if you have any question.
Regards,
iConcept Press
Web: www.iConceptPress.com
Again, I wonder why I would pay for an open access book chapter? These chapters seem to undergo minimal (if any) peer review (I have never been asked to review any and I have never heard of anyone else being approached either) so all an open access book chapter amounts to is a PDF document hosted on a website. I might as well make the text available on the web myself. For free.
Good post. I`ve just received a similar email. Searched throught text and found your post.
I get lots of these and just delete them when I see the subject line. I’ve never read far enough down to notice that they want payment!
An academic variant of Nigerian 419 spam perhaps
[…] submissions and demand high fees to publish manuscripts in dodgy books and journals (here, here, here and […]
Dear Per,
I read your post with interest. My story is different to yours and quite unethical. I too got a letter like you. Having little experience of these scams I fell in to the trap of sending iconcept press a book chapter written by two of my students and me for their book ‘Reliability Analysis’ authored by Fernando Moala. Later we were informed by iconcept press that they had accepted the chapter.Then they asked us for money. As they had a condition stating that the fee will be waived if all authors were from a third world country we asked them for a waive of fee to which they agreed. Subsequently they even put our book chapter on the web and specified that the printing of the book was in progress. Then after some time the chapter was transfered from Reliability Analysis to some other completely irrelevant book. As the months went by and there was no word of the book my co-author had made an inquiry from iconcept press to which the answer was that they could not accept our chapter because it was irrelevant to their books. We are certain this is because we could not pay. Now I can vouch for it Per that iconcept is a VANITY PRESS. I have all their email correspondence with me and I know I can sue them. However I have opted not to do so. We will send the paper to a journal having a reputed publisher. It gives me great pleasure to state my case and save so many other researchers from this bogus business. I am ready to provide you more material if you want to expose iconcept press.
Hello,
i too have received an email to write a book chapter for iconcept.
but after reading all this i will not send this.
i humbly request all that if there are any more such cases they too should be shared online so that we are aware and do not fall victim to such bogus firms
Hello all,
They have certainly stepped up their game. I have just got an invitation to review a manuscript, with a pretty genuine looking request:
“I would like to invite you to review a manuscript entitled “Community-centred eco-bio-social approach to control dengue vectors: an intervention study from Myanmar”. This manuscript is submitted to one of our books entitled “Epidemiology – Theory, Research and Practice”. The abstract of the manuscript appears at the bottom of this email. Please note that the paper could be an extended/expanded version of one of the author’s published paper.
I sincerely hope that you would accept this invitation. The report due date is 21 days from the time you accepted. Please indicate whether you could accept this invitation by clicking one of the following links:”
Fortunately, I googled iConcept and found Per’s blog. This is damaging scholarship, particularly in developing countries. There is need to verify all invitations to either submit, or review manuscripts.
I am in disagreement. I have published with iconcept, after i verified that i am not publishing with some bogus website. My chapter was reviewed and accepted only after making changes. They rejected another chapter just because i couldnt review as per te sugeations of the reviewers
The first chapter was publiahed and is available on amazon, to buy
Hope this post will somewhat vaguely clarify the word about iconceptpress
got a similar mail. Going by the above reviews decided not to publish.
Ali can you expand your reviews.
Aside from the Jeffrey’s web site (Beall’s “List of predatory publishers”), this blog is the second relevant place I stumbled upon trying to figure what exactly is it in these INTECH (confidental!) calls mentioned in more and more instances. What struck me in their last one is the name of the editor, a well known scientist in it’s zoology field (TR listed) with coherent and clear field of published papers and books (I just contacted him directly to see whether he actually is AWARE he is listed as an editor !? Being a researcher too, with a name not really internationally recognizable, I am starting to think that my name could potentially fit into such “projects”…..
Another disgusting part of these emails is where INTECH warns on the confidentiality of the call with legal implications should I choose to disclose the contents openly !!
Lastly, at the bottom of the email one can read:
“quote”You have received this e-mail in the genuine belief that its contents would be of interest to you. To not receive these messages from Scientific Direct or other carefully selected organizations, please go to our preference page.
Scientific Direct
1500 Spring Garden Street
4th Fl
Philadelphia, PA 19130
USA
“endquote”
What do you make of this ???