A mess indeed.
Be on the lookout for spam from a man using the fake persona of “Dr. Karl Heinz” and soliciting manuscripts for two open-access journals of abysmal quality. The journals use the initialisms JMESS and JMEST and claim they’re based in Germany, buy I suspect they are really based in eastern Turkey.
The two journals, with overlapping scopes, are:
- Journal of Multidisciplinary Engineering Science and Technology (JMEST)
- Journal of Multidisciplinary Engineering Science Studies (JMESS)
Here’s part of a spam email that “Professor Heinz” has blasted out to numerous researchers:
Blah, blah, blah.
On the JMEST website, there is a call for papers that highlights the five-day time between submission and publication in the open-access journal:
Strong evidence of a weak journal.
I’ve been receiving emails from “Dr. Heinz” asking me to remove the two journals from my list, something I have no plans to do. Here’s a sample:
Dear Jeffry,
I hope you are fine, I am Dr. Heinz from Germany, we have journals jmest and jmess in your list. But we could not understand why you added our journals to your list. We are working with under formal process. I mean our ISSN numbers are valid, and we have more than 400 reviewers and 60 editors to serve academicians.
Here is the some of explanation our journal, we kindly request remove our journal names from your list.
We look forward to hear from you.
Note that having a valid ISSN is not a measure of quality, and quality is something that both of these journals are saliently lacking.
In another email “Dr. Heinz” indicated this as the publisher’s German headquarters address: Gemeinde Neukölln, 10965 Berlin.
The domain name registration points to a different name, however. Here’s some of the domain name data for JMESS (which matches that of JMEST):
Registrant ID: ovh56168bfbaemw Registrant Name: Naci Kalkan Registrant Organization: Registrant Street: jmess.org, office #8621028 Registrant Street: c/o OwO, BP80157 Registrant City: Roubaix Cedex 1 Registrant State/Province: Registrant Postal Code: 59053 Registrant Country: FR Registrant Phone: +33.899498765
A source tells me that “Dr. Karl Heinz” is really Naci Kalkan, the person to whom the journals’ websites are registered.
Not Teutonic at all.
Kalkan is a “research assistance” at Bitlis Eren University in eastern Turkey. He’s published (or self-published) at least one article in JMEST, too.
The world of scholarly open-access publishing is full of such deceit, and when it comes to open access, you can’t be sure of anything anymore. Proceed with extreme caution.
