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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 theluggage on Tuesday August 18 2015, @11:59AM
On the one hand, if you can't fulfil this by cutting and pasting 4 entries from the bibliography section of your paper then its probably not going to get through review anyway. Not saying that's a good thing - just realistic.
On the other hand... being mechanical about the 'different country' requirement is unnecessary and could be an unreasonable limitation in smaller fields, and the 'Experts Database' thing would have my alarm bells ringing as to their real motivation.