New Predatory Publisher Copies Look and Feel of BioMed Central

The impostor (top) and the victim (bottom).

BioMed Research is a brand-new open-access publisher based in India that recently launched with 21 open-access journals. The publisher copies the look, feel — and even the tagline — of the established OA publisher BioMed Central.

This new publisher has a single, six-member editorial board for all 21 of its low-quality journals, and it promises a fast peer review process:

We Review the Manuscript under Fast Track System and time taken from submission to online publication is Less Than 10 Days!

Most of the new publisher’s journals have article content, but it is lifted from other publishers. For example, the article “Bioactive Potential of Seagrass Extracts against Dengue Fever Mosquito” appears in BioMed Research’s journal called BMR Parasitology, but most of the content appears to be lifted from the article “Bioactivity of seagrass against the dengue fever mosquito Aedes aegypti larvae” that originally appeared in the Asian Pacific Journal of Tropical Biomedicine, a journal published by Elsevier.

It should say “Author Guidelines.”

The publisher claims to be based in Kanpur Nagar, Uttar Pradesh, India. The table below, copied from the website, shows the article processing charges for Indians and for “foreigner authors.”

Discrimination?

This is clearly a junk publisher, and I am sure that the vast majority of researchers will have the scholarly publishing literacy skills necessary to be able to recognize and avoid this as a predatory publisher. Let’s hope it quickly withers and dies.

Appendix: List of BioMed Research Journals as of 2014-09-01:

1. BMR Antioxidants & Redox Biology
2. BMR Biochemistry
3. BMR Bioinformatics & Cheminformatics
4. BMR Biology
5. BMR Biotechnology
6. BMR Cancer Research
7. BMR Cellular and Molecular Biology
8. BMR Complementary and Alternative Medicine
9. BMR Food & Nutrition Research
10. BMR Gene and Genome Biology
11. BMR Medicinal Chemistry Research
12. BMR Medicine
13. BMR Microbiology
14. BMR Parasitology
15. BMR Phytomedicine
16. BMR Toxicology
17. International Journal of Engineering & Scientific Research
18. International Journal of Ethnobiology & Ethnomedicine
19. International Journal of Pharmacy & Bio-Sciences
20. Journal of Plant & Agriculture Research
21. Pharmacology & Toxicology Research