Group? It’s just one guy.
There is no slowdown in the number of new, questionable, and low quality gold open-access publishers appearing and offering their services to scholarly authors. Here I describe one of the latest, Imprints Open Access.
This publisher launched very recently. I became aware of it because a researcher at my University’s health sciences campus was a victim of this firm’s spam email campaign to recruit editorial board members. Here’s a selection from the smarmy email the researcher received:
Really bad spam.
The website is full of prominent typos, as this screenshot shows:
Innovative spelling.
It appears the firm’s email blast to recruit editorial board members was a failure. None of the publisher’s six journals has any editorial board members listed, except one that lists a bogus name and a bogus university:
Never heard of it.
Even though there are no editors-in-chief or editorial board members, the firm is accepting papers. Who will complete the peer review on them? Perhaps this firm, like many others, doesn’t do a peer review. Also, despite its low quality, this publisher has the nerve to charge rather high article processing charges — $950.00 !!
An outrageous charge for such a low-quality operation. Greed!
A look at the domain name registration gives a registration address of 642 Henderson Street, Oak Park, Illinois, United States. Google Maps cannot find this address, so it may be made up. The spam email I saw was signed “Reddy S, Editorial Assistant.” I think the firm is really based in India.
New low-quality OA publishers like this one are appearing almost every day.
Imprints Open Access has left a bad impression on me. It’s an amateurish operation that is an insult to honest scholarly publishing. I recommend that all scholars completely ignore this publisher.
Hat tip: Ben Hanke
Appendix: List of Imprints Open Access journals as of 2014-05-11
- Journal of Biotechnology & Computational Biology
- Journal of Cellular Immunology & Immunotherapeutics
- Journal of Chemistry & Chemical Synthesis
- Journal of Community Medicine & Health Affairs
- Journal of Current Cancer Research
- Journal of Pharmocology [sic] & Pharmacogenomics
