The original, respected journal.
As the surge of open-access journals continues, we are seeing more cases of journal title duplication. Here’s a case in which a one-man, Toronto-based OA outfit essentially copied the title of an established scholarly journal from a respected British publisher.
- Original journal: The Journal of Agricultural Science
- Copycat journal: Journal of Agricultural Science
The original journal is published by Cambridge University Press. Its first volume is from 1906.
The shabby copy.
The Toronto-based publisher is called Canadian Center of Science and Education. Its Journal of Agriculture has been published since 2009.
The Canadian Center of Science and Education (CCSE) is one of four brands or imprints owned by Wenwu Zhao, who immigrated to Canada from China in the early 2000s and began publishing. It is based in Toronto. His other three brands are:
Macrothink Institute (publishes 37 journals; purports to be based in Las Vegas, Nevada)
SciEdu Press (publishes 25 journals)
RedFame Publishing (publishes 10 journals; purports to be based in Beaverton, Oregon)
The journals are all broad in scope, and I have documented that CCSE does a pretend peer review. Zhao is a massive spammer, but he often creates and uses fake female identities in the spam emails. One of the names he uses is Bella Dong. I call this “spamming in drag.”‘
Wenwu Zhao
Finally, climate change skeptic Khabibullo Abdusamatov has used the CCSE journal Applied Physics Research to publish one of his controversial works.
Are publishers like this one the future of scholarly communication?
