Also called “ART Group.”
Iran-based Aria Farnoos Isatis Co., Ltd publicly presents itself as an author services company, providing translation and copy editing services to scholarly authors, but a close analysis of the spam email it is sending to journal editors and publishers reveals a questionable motive. The spam email bears this title: “Collaboration proposal in journal publishing/ impact factor increasing.”
I got a copy of a spam email this company sent to a journal in southern Europe. In the message, the company refers to itself as “ART Group.”
These selections from the spam reveal the firm’s true motives. Again, this spam email is a proposal being sent to scholarly journals and publishers:
Our Headquarter is located in Tehran with affiliated offices in Ahvaz, Mashhad and Isfahan. We also have partners in India, Pakistan and Iraq. We also have offices in three major universities of Iran where we provide the aforementioned services to faculty members and researchers. We have more than 4000 regular registered clients who use scientific publishing services of our company.
Regarding the aforementioned descriptions, we offer you a collaboration proposal in two fields: Journal paper submission and Impact factor increasing plan.
Description of proposal: ART Group sends you high numbers of papers, 20 papers per issue for the start. We review the scientific contribution, novelty and scope of the paper and select the appropriate prepares. Then, we prepare the manuscripts performing the language editing, journal formatting and finalize them for submission.
Peer review process: ART group can perform a peer review process for each paper and evaluates the scientific contribution of them. In this case the expected submission to publication period will reduce to 20 days.
Impact factor increasing plan
Description of proposal: ART Group has more than 4000 regular clients who are faculty researchers from different universities in Iran and other countries. We have collaboration contract with three main universities in Iran. As a result, high numbers of scientific papers are handled by our teams. We offer journal selection, editing and scientific consulting services for these papers. We can cite the published papers in your previous issue(s) of your journal in the papers submitted in high Impact Factor journals. These plan guarantees the impact factor increase of the target journal through a 1 to 2 years period.
ART Group cites the papers published in the target journal in the papers submitting to the high IF journals to increase the impact factor and cross or self citation indices of the target journal. In this case we need the archive of previous issues of the journal. Usually, we firstly submit some original and review papers of our clients into your target journal. We expect a rapid peer-reviewing process for our submitted papers. We will submit two to five papers for each issue of your journal and cite these papers in future high IF journals. For each issue, depending on the subject and field of study one to five citations are achievable.
ART Group has currently partnership agreements with several journals and publishers. Also, high numbers of highly H-index authors use our services. Therefore, we have good potential in offering the impact factor increasing services.
The spam email is signed:
Avoid like the plague.
Ali Yadollahpour
I think that A. Yadollahpour is really Ali Yadollahpour. I cannot confirm that he is really a DOAJ (Directory of Open-Access Journals) associate editor as he claims in the spam email, but it may be true.
I was easily able to find unoriginal, uncited text in his article “Applications of Expert Systems in Management of Chronic Kidney Disease: A Review of Predicting Techniques.” Yadollahpour clearly knows how to work the system to his advantage.
I think this guy and his company are a threat to the integrity of scholarly communication. I wonder how many publishers this company has signed up as clients and how much damage it’s already done.
I strongly recommend that scholarly authors and scholarly journals avoid doing business with Aria Farnoos Isatis Co., Ltd.
Appendix:
The full spam email, with the recipient publisher’s name redacted.
