Finally, some consequences for spamming.
Nigeria-based International Research Journals is being cut off by its United States-based Internet service provider for spamming, a violation of the provider’s terms of service. The publisher’s old domain name was http://interesjournals.org. The new domain name is http://interesjournal.org, but it is unclear who the publisher’s new ISP is. At this time, both domains are active, as the old ISP gives the company time to transfer its files.
The company that expelled International Research Journals appears to be IXwebhosting, based in Columbus, Ohio.
This information comes via an email that the publisher sent to one of its authors, who then forwarded the email to me.
In the email, the publisher blames competitors in the U.S. and Canada, who he says had enough influence with the ISP to get them to cut off International Research Journals. He claims this was done to dampen competition.
Here is the letter the publisher is sending out to its authors:
Dear [deleted]
Thanks for the submission of paper(s) to our journal (Educational Research, ER).
I want to inform you that we are having a downtime in our site: interesjournals.org. The reason is that our webhost are a small hosting company based in the USA. They are about to be blacklisted because of complaints of mails coming out of our mailboxes. These complaints are from some group of people who are also journal publishers that are afraid of our strength in journal publication. These people are based in USA and Canada. They have access to our webhost, they just contact them and our site is suspended. However, our previous webhost suggested we look for a bigger webhost to host our site because the pressure is too much on them and they promise to transfer the domain interesjournals.org to our new webhost within the next seven days. The transfer is currently ongoing. All of our contents are still intact.
In our effort to serve you better, so that our clients will not be worried, our new webhost suggested we should use this new website: interesjournal.org pending the transfer of the previous site.
Therefore, all of our contents and papers are now located in interesjournal.org. Therein, you will find your published and incoming papers. We do apologize for the inconveniences.
Thanks for your understanding and cooperation.
Kind Regards,
Ame Obobaifo,
Editorial Assistant,
NB: All contacts and correspondences should be forwarded to support.eduresearch@gmail.com
This may open up a new method of shutting down predatory publishers — complaining to their ISPs about the UCE (unsolicited commercial email) they send out. Perhaps we’ll give this a try.
