November 29, 2014

Predatory Publishers and open access scientific work: new online gold rush?

I don't know about you but I receive regularly emails with such texts:

Dear Efthymios Constantinides;Stefan J Fountain,

After countless hours toiling over your dissertation, you’ve finally reached the finish line. Is it possible to expand your readership, to share your ideas with other scholars, to join in the academic conversation regarding your topic, and possibly even to advance your career? The answer: Yes. But how to do?
You can refine the ideas presented in your dissertation and generate a new journal paper or compose several journals papers on the basis of the different views introduced in your dissertation. To attract more readers, you’d better add some new researches or views to your existed work.

As ##################### has the honor to read your paper titled Web 2.0: Conceptual foundations and marketing issues which was published in Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice and thinks that your paper is of value to read. So ############ sincerely welcomes you to generate new papers on the topic of Web 2.0, social media, internet marketing, online marketing, online consumer behaviour, direct marketing, marketing strategy and submit them to ############## journals or special issues. 

(I liked especially the "countless hours toiling over your dissertation" thing)

This text referring to one of my articles is the approach many of us have witnessed lately as a way used by new born and usually dubious open access scientific publishers. Doing a little background research I discovered that the name of the ########### publisher  who was so enthusiastically invite me to publish is one of the mushrooming dubious open access online publishers and prominent among the List of Predatory Publishers I found in the Scholarly Open Access blog.
What I found amazing is the fast growth of such publishers indicating another online gold rush developing in the Open Access publishing (see table)

 Any experiences with such practices are welcome.