Per Ola Kristensson | Blog

Blog
 Publications
 Software
 Other Stuff

Archive for the ‘publishers’ Category

More open access spam

Thursday, October 6th, 2011

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=BK020A

We 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 2012

Please 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.

Posted in computer science, open access, peer review, publishers, spam, spamming | 9 Comments »

Bentham open access journal accepted nonsense manuscript

Saturday, November 6th, 2010

The previous post described various commercial open access publishers spamming for book chapters and journal articles. Now I read that Phil Davis at the blog The Scholarly Kitchen sent a SCIgen-generated nonsense manuscript to “The Open Information Science Journal” published by Bentham. Four months later Bentham accepted the paper and offered to publish it for a $800 fee. No reviews were provided with the acceptance letter.

It looks like at least some of these commercial open access publishers are essentially vanity presses that will publish anything for a hefty fee. It is a shame they are doing this since they may drag down the reputation of reputable open access publishers, such as PLoS. Another danger is that we will see even more use of pseudo-scientific rankings and measures of the impact of journals based on citations just so that people can filter out all the meaningless junk. I suppose no one is any longer interested in reading the actual articles.

In defense of open access journals, a journal called “Applied Mathematics and Computation” which has been published by Elsevier since 1975 has apparently also accepted an automatically generated nonsense paper.

Posted in bibliometrics, computer science, impact factor, open access, peer review, publishers, research, science, spam, spamming | 4 Comments »

Academic spam and open access publishing

Thursday, November 4th, 2010

Judging by how much spam I get nowadays it seems academic open access publishing is lucrative.

I keep getting targeted spam from Bentham, Hindawi, InTech, and others. The strategy seems to be to mine reputable conference and journal papers for email addresses and then use them for targeted spam.

I have now received five emails from open access publisher InTech about a book chapter based on a previously published paper. These guys never give up! This is an excerpt from the last one:

Dear Dr. Kristensson,

We apologize for contacting you again on the matter of your nomination to contribute to the book named in the title of this email, but since we haven’t received an answer from you, we are taking the liberty of contacting you again (you may have been busy or our previous emails may have ended up in your email filters). However, this is the last email you will receive from us. If you can find time, please reply to our previous email which is below:

My name is MSc Iva Lipovic and I am contacting you regarding a new InTech book project under the working title “Speech Technologies”, ISBN: 978-953-307-152-7.

This book will be published by InTech – an Open Access publisher covering the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine.

You are invited to participate in this book project based on your paper “Automatic Selection of Recognition Errors by Respeaking the Intended Text”, your publishing history and the quality of your research. However, we are not asking you to republish your work, but we would like you to prepare a new paper on one of the topics this book project covers.

Why on earth would I spend time and effort to write a book chapter for a random individual I have never heard of and who doesn’t seem to have any credentials whatsoever in the field? And who reads these book chapters? And what exactly is the point of an open access “book chapter”? Sounds like a web page to me. With the exception I have to pay InTech plenty of money to put it up. I might as well just make the text available on the web myself.

Another open access publisher that likes to send spam is Hindawi. However, news to me was that Hindawi now spams on behalf of EURASIP, an organization I thought was reputable (until now):

Dear Dr. Kristensson,

I am writing to invite you to submit an article to “EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing,” which provides a rapid forum for the dissemination of original research articles as well as review articles related to the theory and applications of audio, speech, and music processing.

EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing is published using an open access publication model, meaning that all interested readers are able to freely access the journal online at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/asmp/contents.html without the need for a subscription.

Another example is Bentham who wants me to write a review on random patents based on keyword searches (the weirdest concept I have heard of so far for a journal):

Dear Dr. Kristensson,

Bentham Science Publishers has launched a series of innovative
journals publishing review articles on recent patents in major
therapeutic areas of drug discovery as well as biotechnology,
nanotechnology, engineering, computer science and material science
disciplines. Please refer to Bentham Science’s website at
http://www.pat-comp-sci.org/AllTitles for further details.

An exciting journal entitled “Recent Patents on Computer Science
(CSENG)” was launched in January 2008. This journal publishes review
articles written by experts on recent patents in the field of Computer
Science. Please visit the journal‘s website at
http://www.compscieng.org for the Editorial Board, sample issue,
abstracts of recent issues and other details.

Recent Patents on Computer Science (CSENG) is indexed in Genamics
JournalSeek, Compendex,Scopus

If you would like to submit a review article to the journal on an
important patent area in Computer Science, then please provide us the
title of your proposed article and a tentative date of submission at
editorial@compscieng.org. Moreover in your reply, could you please
suggest some specific keywords, keyword phrases related to your topic,
so that detailed patents may be sent to you for the preparation of
your manuscript.

I keep wondering who is actually editing and reviewing all these journals and books. While they keep spamming me for paper submissions (and lucrative fees after they have accepted the papers), I haven’t received any invitations to do any reviews.

Posted in computer science, open access, peer review, publishers, research, science, spam, spamming | 79 Comments »