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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: 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.