Indian Open-Access Publisher Assigns Metrics to Its Own Journals

Crazy name, crazy publisher.

We recently learned about the scholarly open-access publisher called Researchjournali. It launched with 24 broad journals and is based in Odisha, India. It promises an “editorial decision” in seven days, and authors get to suggest their own peer reviewers.

The publisher’s name is pronounced “Research Journal Eye.” Pretty clever, no? Kind of like Ipod, only for journals, and the “I” is at the end. The publisher has trademarked the name, which is good because I am sure many would want to copy it, it’s so clever.

As we stated, its journals all have a broad scope. One of them is Journal of Education, for example, which is excellent, because the education field really needed another open-access, broad-scoped journal.

In fact, the Journal of Education is this publisher’s top journal. It has the highest RJ factor, and this is a metric created and assigned by this very same publisher.

Equal to the impact factor, no?

The publisher’s website explains the metric:

RJ Factor is a unique index for ranking academic journals published by us in various disciplines. This is an algorithm that assigns score in the range of 0 to 8 to research journals and it is calculated based on available data and other statistics from different sources. RJ factor is used by institutions, librarians and researchers to rank our journals and this is equivalent to other available measures often used for ranking of scholarly journals

In other words, the numbers are just made up, and their purpose is to trick naïve researchers into thinking they are submitting their work to legitimate journals.

Perhaps the only really redeeming thing about this publisher is the hilarious advertising video they have produced and uploaded to YouTube. It features an American actor reading a script written in Indian dialect English. I found it funny and also pitifully sad.

Appendix: Researchjournali journals as of 2014-08-13:

1. Journal of Accounting
2. Journal of Advertising
3. Journal of Agriculture
4. Journal of Business Ethics
5. Journal of Commerce
6. Journal of Computer Science
7. Journal of Economics
8. Journal of Education
9. Journal of Entrepreneurship
10. Journal of Finance
11. Journal of Geography
12. Journal of History
13. Journal of Hospitality Tourism
14. Journal of Human Resource
15. Journal of Information Technology
16. Journal of Management
17. Journal of Marketing
18. Journal of Mathematics
19. Journal of Media Studies
20. Journal of Public Policy
21. Journal of Sociology
22. Journal of Sports Management
23. Journal of Supply Chain Management
24. Journal of Technology Management