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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: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 17 2015, @11:27PM
I started thinking academia was weird about halfway through my recent PhD, I decided to see if it was possible to still do a good job under these conditions. The result is I did a much better job than my peers but the result was still half assed and unfinished. The final years were essentially psychological torture having to deal with well meaning people above me who apparently have no idea what they are doing, it seems likely they have unknowingly wasted their lives inadvertently spreading misinformation. The farther I get away from it the more my mood improves, but really I am lucky to still be alive. So get out early if you start suspecting this, it is not worth it.