Two Bizarre New OA Publishers Help Mark the Decline of Scholarly Publishing

The world’s two newest scholarly publishers, both failures.

Two strange, scholarly open-access publishers recently launched and began spamming for article submissions. While early predatory publishers copied the look and feel of legitimate publishers’ websites, recent launches, such as these, are essentially copies of copies, with each new generation of OA publisher wilder than the earlier one. Here I’ll describe new publishers Everant Publisher Pvt Ltd and WAST.

Unbelievably bad welcome message.

Everant

Everant Publisher Pvt Ltd is based in Mandsaur, India and launched with twenty, broad-scoped journals (list below). I learned about it through a spam email I personally received from them inviting me to submit a paper.

The journal displays an illiterate welcome message, as shown in the image above. Copied verbatim, it says,

“EVERANT- A Researcher who can built our self by research work with the help of Education to success their Vision with Effort of Revolution for Achievement with Neat Teamwork that is known as “EVERANT

As a marketing strategy, the publisher created a new name (Everant) and gave it a definition, but the name, definition, and publisher itself are all failures.

Each of the journal titles combines two topics, a strategy to facilitate the creation of unique titles and to further broaden the scope of each journal. Some of the journal titles don’t make sense, such as Journal of Language Literature. In its cover image, the journal’s title is given as Journal of Language Literature and Library.

Journal of ineptitude.

WAST

WAST stands for World Academy of Science and Technology. It is not an “academy” in any honest sense. It’s just a newly-minted website that wants to make easy money from researchers. The publisher states its location as:

WAST Headquarter

187 E. Warm Springs Rd., Suite B375,
Las Vegas, Nevada 89119, US

Of course, the firm is not really based in the U.S. It uses the address of a virtual office company called MyNewCompany.com, Inc.

Another fake academy.

I think they’re really based in India, but there may also be some Malaysian and Russian connections.

Describing themselves, they say this:

World Academy of Science and Technology is one of the world’s scientific research union, which is for holistic professionals, doctors, scientist & research scholars that provide a forum where members may exchange ideas, information, techniques and methodologies. This is an official website of the World Academy of Science and Technology is constituted to promote association amongest Engineers, Pharmacists, Doctors, Scientists, Law experts, Hotel Managements Experts, Social Science Professionals and other Professionals involved in research and innovation.

The firm publishes thirteen journals whose titles all begin with “International Journal of” and whose subjects are already saturated with open-access journals.

Finally, they promise a two-week turnaround time between submission and publication:

Submission to publication in to weeks.

 The owners of both of these two new scholarly publishers naively think they can cash in on the open-access movement. They will deceive only a very few.

However, some researchers will use the easy publishing the publishers offer and get easy publications to be used for academic credit at colleges and universities that use quantity and not quality in their evaluation of research.

Appendix: Lists of journals for each publisher as of 2015-11-14

Everant

1. Account and Financial Management Journal
2. Civil Engineering and Architecture Journal
3. Engineering and Information Science Technology Journal
4. Food Science and Sports Science Journal
5. Health Science and Biomedical Journal
6. International Economy Review and Research
7. Journal of Agriculture and Dairy
8. Journal of Language Literature
9. Journal of Life Science and Biotechnology
10. Journal of Medical Practice and Review
11. Journal of Robotic and Cybernetics Research
12. Management and Economic Journal
13. Mathematics and Computer Science Journal
14. Engineering and Technology Journal
15. Medical and Clinical Invention Journal
16. Medical Surgery and Case Studies
17. Microbiology and Biochemistry Journal
18. Nursing and Midwifery Journal
19. Plant and Animal Science Journal
20. Social Science and Humanities Journal

WAST

1. International Journal of Advanced Animal Biotechnology
2. International Journal of Advanced Medical and Health Sciences
3. International Journal of Sports Fitness and Exercise Sciences
4. International Journal of Advances in Computer Science and Information Technology
5. International Journal of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences
6. International Journal of Chemical Engineering
7. International Journal of Cloud Computing & Big Data
8. International Journal of Emerging Advancements in Electronics and Electrical Engineering
9. International Journal of Emerging Trends in Engineering, Science & Technology
10. International Journal of Management, Economics and Finance
11. International Journal of Mechanical & Civil Engineering
12. International Journal of Remote Sensing, GIS and Earth Sciences
13. International Journal of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence