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from the looking-for-references-in-all-the-wrong-places dept.
An Anonymous Coward write:
A friend from academia recently invited me to write a paper for a journal that he is guest editing. I don't write many papers (not in academia), so I figured I better look through the Author Guidelines to see what formats they would accept, etc.
Here is the Inderscience author faq page.
This one stopped me in my tracks:
Why am I asked to identify four experts?
You must identify four experts in the subject of your article, details of which will be requested during online submission. The experts must not be members of the editorial board of any Inderscience journal, must not be from your* institution, and at least two of them must be from a different country from you*.
The purpose of this request is ensure your familiarity with the latest research literature in the field and to identify suitable experts who can be added to our Experts Database and who may be asked if they are willing to review articles for Inderscience journals; we are unlikely to ask them to referee your article.
(*"you" refers to all authors of the paper)
Has anyone else been asked to identify professional friends by a journal publisher?
Needless to say, I'm not writing anything for Inderscience until this request is removed. Or maybe I'll write the paper as a favor to my friend...and provide names of experts from my field who are deceased.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 17 2015, @08:04PM
You know, like refer-a-friend sales tactic?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 17 2015, @08:22PM
OTOH if you're paying them to publish, they can't really turn you down as long as you pay them the money, right? Thats my interpretation of academic publishing. There is a hierarchy of journals, but its a matter of which journal you pay to publish, not a matter of waiving the fee.
I suspect you could put random names down and some commissioned sales droid will look right past that assuming the check clears. Worst case scenario they say no you go to the next publisher who takes your money and prints your paper.
I can respect one aspect of the marketing campaign in that they're asking for permission, kinda sorta, rather than just harvesting your paper's reference section without asking permission. Your paper does have references, right? You could just give them the first four names from the endnotes.
Some of the questions are a little personal. I know Greg G Rose is a cryptographer from Australia and he is (was? He's still alive I think...) an expert on stream ciphers but I'm not on a first name basis with him so I have no idea what editorial boards he might or might not be on and where he might live today. He might be here today on SN for all I know. So do you want to know an expert on stream ciphers or do you want the details of someone I actually know all the info about? (here's the contact info for my wife; she doesn't know anything about stream ciphers but on the bright side I'm sure she isn't on any Inderscience editorial boards and we no longer work together which is apparently the most important data).
Fundamentally it smells like protection against the "well known" problem in India and some other foreign countries where you have to get a paper printed to graduate, so fake-ish journals and fake-ish conferences are set up to help lower the bar to produce more graduates. They didn't mention that at least 2 experts can't be your fellow students in India even if everyone knows what they mean. I'm not even in academentia and even I know about fake India conferences and journals.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday August 17 2015, @08:32PM
Wrong. Of course if they don't publish, you don't have to pay. But just because you pay for publication does not mean they have to accept everything you send them. They are making the journal, they can decide what they accept for it. Of course, if they decide badly, they may one day see themselves without authors and/or without readers (depending on in which way they decide badly). But that's their risk.
If you don't like their conditions, you are free not to to send them your papers. If you don't fulfil their requirements, they are free to reject your article.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 17 2015, @09:14PM
Submitter says, "...invited me to write a paper" so it doesn't seem like any money is going to the publisher.
It does seem like publisher is fishing for names for their contact list...and can sell the list as a backhanded way to make some money.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Kell on Monday August 17 2015, @11:23PM
Absolutely not necessarily the case. I get -bombarded- with "invitations to submit", all of which expect me to pay for the privilege (the amount of crapmail academics get is astonishing). The journals all believe that they are doing you a favour by deigning to publish your work, so why shouldn't they charge you for it? And as long as the publish-or-perish mentality persists, it won't change. The journals have a vested interest in maintaining the artificial scarcity of publication bandwidth because there's a lot of money to be made.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 5, Funny) by VLM on Monday August 17 2015, @09:36PM
Banks would never make bad loans because, although they're paid on commission, crashing the world financial system would negatively impact revenue years after their employment ended, so they'd never do that.