Questionable Subscription Publisher Acts Like a Predatory OA One

A publisher to avoid.

Knowledge Enterprises Journals is a subscription publisher that acts like a predatory publisher. It charges author fees, yet it’s not open-access. It requires copyright transfer, and it sends lots of annoying, high pressure, spam.

The publisher has seven, broad-scope journals in its portfolio. It uses the free Open Journals Systems as its publishing platform, and its website is spare and plain. It looks like they used all the default settings.

The publisher gives this as its address:

340 S Lemon Ave #7750
Walnut CA 91789 USA

… but this is a mail forwarding service company’s address. It’s really based somewhere in the 612 area code, that is, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The publisher says this regarding its author fees:

AUTHOR FEES

This journal charges the following author fees.

Article Submission: 100.00 (USD)

Authors are required to pay an Article Submission Fee as part of the submission process to contribute to review costs.

Article Publication: 49.00 (USD)

For authors that have two or more co-authors, research funding, or work for an institution that routinely covers the cost of journal charges, the fee if [sic] $75 per page. For all authors that do not meet at least one of the above criteria, the fee is $49 per page.

So it appears authors have to pay a submission fee, a publication fee, and then a per-page fee. The fees are not congruent with the low quality of the journals.

Manipulative email strategy.

The publisher uses the increasingly-common “my previous email” trick. This tactic involves making a reference to a fictional, earlier email, one that was never sent. It’s designed to make the recipient feel guilty for not responding to the email and to focus their attention on the current email. Several people forwarded me copies of Knowledge Enterprises Journals’ emails indicating to me that they found them annoying. I have added this publisher to my list, making an exception because its practices match those of many of the low-quality publishers on the list, even though it’s a subscription publisher.

One of the publisher’s journals, Astronomical Review, also appears on two other websites:

http://astroreview.com/
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tare20#.VRMy92PpViM

It appears as one of this publisher’s journals here:

http://www.journals.ke-i.org/index.php/AstRv/about/index

I do not know why the journal appears on three websites or why one of those sites is Taylor & Francis. What association does Taylor & Francis have with this journal?

I recommend that researchers avoid Knowledge Enterprises Journals.

Appendix: List of Knowledge Enterprises Journals as of 2015-03-25:

1. Astronomical Review
2. Biomedical Engineering Review
3. International Biology Review
4. International Chemistry Review
5. Journal of Economics and Banking
6. Medical Research Archives
7. Quarterly Physics Review