Accelerating profits
OMICS Group, the Hyderabad, India-based group of scholarly publishing-related companies, is expanding and now operates at least twelve publishing imprints (brands), as well as a scholarly conferences division.
It is headed by a dubious character who seems intent on conquering all of scholarly publishing and who may be a megalomaniac. Here I present an update on OMICS Group’s highly questionable business practices and describe the man behind them, Srinubabu Gedela.
OMICS Group now operates the following brands. Most are scholarly journal imprints.
OMICS Publishing Group Brands
Open Access Scientific Reports
I don’t have any direct evidence that the following three publishers are owned by OMICS. However, I have received reports that their business practices match those of the OMICS brands listed above.
Specifically, OMICS brands victimize researchers using spam email article solicitations that make no mention of the required publishing fees, quickly accepting papers the researchers submit and refusing to honor withdrawal requests when the horrified authors are presented with a bill for the publishing fees, fees that often are in the thousands of dollars.
Developing Country Think Tank Institute
Tag line fail.
The newest OMICS Group brand is the so-called United Scientific Group, with the tag line — A Maven Connecting Scientific Community — that makes no sense. The brand is still in the formative stages and has not yet launched any journals. It purports to be based in Silicon Valley.
I think OMICS Group’s business practices are highly questionable. The firm seeks to exploit the reputations of top researchers, their institutions, and legitimate scholarly publishing organizations. It capitalizes on these identities in its advertising, websites, and editorial boards and uses them to feign legitimacy and attract new article submissions, its main revenue source.
OMICS Group journals are known for publishing lots of “easy” papers such as commentaries, editorials, viewpoints, brief papers that fill up the online pages of its over 350 open-access journals. These quickly-written and published editorials then serve to make the journals appear more successful than they really are. They are full of content, but the content is mere fill.
The publisher purposefully belabors the process of removing names from journal editorial boards, ignoring initial requests and only removing names, in some cases, when legal action is threatened or initiated.
As stated, OMICS Group exploits the unwary; it spams researchers, broadcasting spam emails that make no mention of the publishing fees and then quickly accepts submitted papers. It then refuses to honor withdrawal requests when the horrified authors are presented with a bill for the publishing fees, fees that often are in the thousands of dollars.
Srinubabu Gedela
There is one main operator behind the Evil Empire of OMICS Group, and that man is Srinubabu Gedela. Coy and diminutive, he wears polyester sportcoats. He self-publishes a website full of puffery in which he paints himself as a corporate hero and fatuously crowns himself a ‘philathroper.’
He claims a Ph.D., but some have questioned whether he really completed it. It’s known he spent some time at Stanford but unclear whether he actually left there having earned any academic credential. It is at Stanford where he became fascinated with the word OMICS and decided to christen his publishing company with the term.
Writing in May, 2013, I documented what appears to be significant, apparent plagiarism in a book chapter that appeared under his name:
Gedela, Srinubabu. (2011). Integration, warehousing, and analysis strategies of omics data. In B. Mayer (Ed.), Bioinformatics for Omics data: Methods and protocols (pp. 399-414). New York: Humana Press.
My analysis is here, and it shows that Gedela’s chapter includes text lifted from Wikipedia articles, among other sources, with no attribution, no quotation marks.
Now Gedela is using his immense profits to try his hand in Bollywood as a Telugu film producer, brandishing his wealth for all to see as a member of the nouveau riche.
If you get spam from this company, the spam will not identify the publisher as OMICS Group; it will only use the name of the journal. Therefore, it is now necessary to carry out exhaustive research before accepting any spam email solicitation. Do not submit any work to any of the OMICS Group brands listed here.
OMICS is a sneaky company that will use deception to get you to submit a scholarly manuscript. If you do, the paper will be quickly accepted, and you will receive an invoice in a week or so. Gedela’s lackeys will refuse to withdraw the paper, and they will hound you for the balance due, which will total several thousand dollars.
