In late 2012, I was the victim of criminal impersonation. Someone sent out emails that looked like they were from me, asking for money to remove a publisher from my list. The technique they used is called email spoofing.
British journalist Richard Poynder recently wrote a blog post about the case, a blog post that contains an interview with Egyptian national Aly Ashry, who runs Ashdin Publishing in Belgium. Ashdin is listed on my list of predatory publishers, a listing I stand by and confirm.
In the blog post/interview, Mr. Aly states,
There is no plagiarism or self-plagiarism in any of our journals. All Ashdin articles are original, and it is easy for our editors and reviewers to detect plagiarism and reject any article containing it. Each accepted article will have been passed by 2 reviewers and 2 editors before it is accepted.
This statement is false.
The article “Gaseous Pollutants Formation and Their Harmful Effects on Health and Environment” by Yousef S. H. Najjar and published in the Ashdin journal Innovative Energy Policies, volume 1 (2011). doi:10.4303/iep/E101203 contains significant plagiarism.
The article contains this passage immediately after the abstract (p. [1]):
Unfortunately, this text is taken verbatim from page 37 of the textbook Thermodynamics: An Engineering Approach, 4th ed., 2002, by Yunus A. Cengel and Michael Boles. ISBN 9780072549041.
The citations in the passage in the article do not refer to the book but to other sources and are therefore false. In my opinion, this article should be retracted. Ashdin’s other journals contain additional examples of plagiarism. I recommend that scholars do not serve on Ashdin Publishing’s editorial boards, and I recommend that they not submit articles to the publisher.