Brokerage house.
Aspirans.com is an article broker. In other words, it’s a company that will arrange for you to publish articles in scholarly journals. All that’s required is a credit card.
The company specializes in arranging the publishing of articles in journals that:
- Are indexed in Scopus, or,
- Have legitimate Thomson Reuters impact factors
Aspirans.com seeks out and finds journals that meet these criteria and also offer easy acceptance of articles. They find these weakest links and provide authors the service of getting published there.
The gold (author pays) open-access model has a conflict of interest. The more articles a gold open-access journal accepts and publishes, the more money it makes.
There are thousands of journals in the Scopus database and thousands of journals with Thomson Reuters impact factors. Many are in both databases. Occasionally, some of the gold OA journals in these databases “go bad” and skimp on peer review so they can earn easy money from desperate authors.
Article brokers like Aspirans.com specialize in finding these weakest-link journals and brokering the publication of articles in the journals.
Here is one of those journals. It’s the European Journal of Science and Theology.
Easy Journal of Science and Theology
I’ve learned of a connection between Aspirans.com and this journal, which is indexed in Scopus.
If you need a publication in a Scopus-indexed journal, you can contact Aspirans and they will help you. I am told the fee is $600.
Looking at some of the journal’s recent issues, one observes that they are large, full of articles, and many of the articles have no apparent connection to the journal’s focus, the intersection of science and theology.
There are many out-of-scope articles published in the journal, evidence of a connection to an article broker. Here are some examples:
Social Adaptation Features of Children in Foster Care
National Profiles of Internet-Communication Results of Cross-National Cluster Analysis
Urals and the Problem of ‘Eastern Ancestral Home’ Of Hungarians
The Fortification of Settlements in Medieval Alania
Recent issues of the journal show a healthy number of articles being published. Here is the data for volume 11 (2015):
11.1 (February) = 24
11.2 (April) = 18
11.3 (June) = 24
11.4 (August) = 24
11.5 (October) = 26
The journal states that it will publish six issues per year, but it’s already published the August and October issues. That’s five issues this year, with five months to go.
European Journal of Science and Theology is cryptic about its author fees, saying only, “Page charge: There is no charge per printed page.”
Open-access journals, author payments, and the pressure to publish in indexed journals continue to bring much corruption to scholarly publishing.
The best strategy for researchers is to develop and submit their article manuscripts themselves to high-quality, well-managed, truly peer-reviewed journals, following the journal’s instructions, using the other articles as examples, and utilizing their own language editor if needed.
Brokers that promise to “fix” articles and submit them to the most suitable journal do it knowing that they can just make them look good visually and send them to weak-link or predatory “journals”, and so authors pay twice and earn no respect in their field.
