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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 bzipitidoo on Monday August 17 2015, @09:41PM
I've never heard of such a requirement. Perhaps it is standard only in some fields, some areas?
It does not sound like a good idea. If it's meant to screen out people who haven't studied the area, it seems a very weak and lazy method. Why couldn't submitters just repeat the names of the authors of papers they referenced in their submission? A submission should be judged on its merits-- its originality and correctness-- and not the submitters' ability to run a few searches.
To "ensure your familiarity with the latest research literature in the field", strikes me as disingenuous and lazy at best. It's such a weak excuse for asking that of authors that I don't believe it. It is so easy to do a few searches to turn up some names that I don't see that request as being at all able to accomplish their stated goal of ensuring familiarity. Do they really have that much trouble screening out spam? Their 2nd reason, "to identify suitable experts who can be added to our Experts Database and who may be asked if they are willing to review articles" sounds much more plausible. They may as well have not even tried to pass off their first excuse as a valid reason.
That they tried this has me wondering about their supposed credentials. Who is Inderscience, and how do we know whether they're fair scholarly publishers? Maybe their one of those predatory publishers who ask too much of authors.