Predatory journals want my papers on reproduction and aquaculture

32 thoughts on “Predatory journals want my papers on reproduction and aquaculture”

1. “We are anxious that we are having only a few days to release the issue. Hence, I have chosen some well-known people like you to hold up us to release the upcoming issue.”

   The grammar here reminds me of those emails I get from foreign royalty who need help in transferring funds from their native country to the U.S.

   1. Foreign royalty? I’m jealous. I only get those emails from bank officers who have come across an unclaimed deceased estate / military men who have found some dead bigwig’s sash.

      But currently I’m flooded with hackers who have put a trojan on my computer, taken pics with my webcam (the one with the post-it note over the lens 🙂 of me visiting pornsites, and want $831 in Bitcoin within 48 hours or their Trojan will destroy all my files and send said pics to all my acquaintances. Sigh…

      cr

      1. ‘stash’, not ‘sash’. Sheesh.

         I suppose one could flog off the sash on Ebay, if the bigwig was notorious enough…

         cr

2. How much were / are they going to ask you for the privilege of publishing your paper in their illustrious journal? My guess is it would be in the hundreds. Maybe I’m wrong – it may be in the thousands.

   Why not go for a white hat hoax with the other one? Your reputation would surely be enhanced by the reveal. If every proper scientist approached by these scammers did that, they’d hopefully be run out of business altogether.

   1. Likely they would only get upset if the check accompanying the paper was a hoax.

      Any instance of a predatory journal rejecting a paper?

   2. A agree, JAC should hoax them. But to save time he could he could write one paper combining reproduction and aquaculture and submit it to both journals….so…

      Studies on the use of the Aquaponics 2500 gal/min pump/biofilter as a marital aid

3. Do they just spam all scientists hoping to get submissions?

   Yep!

   I suggest (if one uses something like google mail), just marking the emails as spam. That way they’ll go into the spam folders of other scientists.

   1. Not just all scientists – anyone published in any scholarly context whatever. I work in IT security but my publications are all more or less philosophy (though one in a sociology of media journal). I get spammed with these attempts too, sometimes even addressed to “Professor” or “Dr.” – I’m neither.

4. I get several of these invitations per day. Usually they are for conferences or journals in China (or organized from China). I’ve been invited as a keynote speaker on wide-ranging topics like rail transportation, public health management, nano-bio-tech (whatever that constitutes), applied mathematics, energy policy, microscopy, and so on…

5. I suspect your guess is correct. They just purchase some emailing list of scientists and spam away. Even I have gotten emails like this and I’m not even a scientist. (Not one anyone knows about anyway.)

6. I’m sure every academic gets these, I do worry that my speed to delete them might lead (have lead) to deleting something genuine.

   I don’t get as many as you, possibly because our spam filter is pretty good, or more likely because I’m not as eminent.

7. “Your prompt submission sustains us a lot and impacts my ranking in the end of this month.”

   And that’s a selling point?

8. I feel annoyed by the barrage of phony calls I get every day, yet enticement by questionable journals seems worse. IMO prudently it was best to not submit a hoax paper, as that could have more negative effects on you than them. On principle truth should win over any feelings of vigilante justice prompting catching them out with pseudo-profound BS connected to your name. It is enough for you to publicly expose such stuff that impacts you and others who have been involved in academic research so the general public can know of the problem.

   1. As I said, I had no intention of submitting a hoax paper, but how delicious that thought would be! But I prefer not polluting science to a dollop of Schadenfreude.

9. “Further, I am going to put this email on my website, which gets about 60,000 subscribers, so people can see how desperate and pathetic you are.”

   A hard but well-deserved reprimand. Very good.

10. English is not first language, these people.

    First time I no make joke here!

    1. The foreigner at least has an excuse. California gal doesn’t.

11. I had one of these requests a few years back that continued all the way to “we await your manuscript”, then to “your submission is overdue and we are very much in need of your manuscript”. All with no responses at all from me.

12. Nothing say ‘personal’ like an insert-the-name-from-the-database field.

    1. 😎

       Reminds me of the Readers Digest special offers I used to get.

       ‘Dear Mr [cr],
       We are sure that you and all your family at [PO Box 2573, New Lynn Mail Centre] will enjoy this unique offer and it will be the envy of all your neighbors in [New Lynn Mail Centre]…’

       cr

13. 427 W Duarte Rd, Suite E, Arcadia, California, CA

    Zillow says this is a 950 square foot condominium valued at 1.5 million dollars.

    Apparently this is Juniper Publishers.

    “Juniper Publishers is a International publishes 1000 Open Access Journals in the fields of Clinical, Medical, Life Science, Pharma, Environmental, Engineering and Management”

    I am speechless now.

    1. Juniper Publishers is evidently what Trump’s “400 pound hacker” is doing these days.

14. I’ve only spent 10 mins on this & nothing is double checked – so forgive errors!

    Fake address: 427 W Duarte Rd, Suite E, Arcadia, California, CA 91007
    Real Address: 427 W Duarte Rd, Apt E, Arcadia, California, CA 91007
    In other words it’s just an apartment that’s posing as an office suite for mailing purposes. The address looks like this:
    https://flic.kr/p/2a8HNEd

    The people who live there go by Chen or Cheng – They will be just a postbox unrelated to the business owners I assume

    The business is Juniper Publishing Group who have a stable of nearly 80 “journals” LISTED HERE

    They have another address: 1280 Vintage Oak St, Simi Valley, CA 93063, USA
    this is a 5-bed family home occupied by Indians & Vietnamese
    Ms Sirisha Chigurupati AKA Sirisha Garikapati & Firisha Garikapati
    Ms Kishore Garikapati & Christopher N Nguyen also live there [the latter AKA Christopher N Tdan]

    Sirisha has a LinkedIn profile that has a lot of positive endorsements but it looks like a large ring of fake LinkedIn pages endorsing her. The CV is strange with a string of jobs at what might be real or fake companies [this sort of shenanigans is common on LinkedIn – LinkedIn is crap]. She claims to have studied at “ANU”, but doesn’t link to ANU & no profile pic.

15. Several times, I have received Emails of this kind from an “editor” with a distinctly Polish name. I Emailed back: Nie, dziękuję.

16. Ag, you can tell them you’ll write a synopsis of some of your work after you received your USD 30.000 honorary cheque (cheap!). They rarely come back.

17. These are a pain. I was just at a society meeting where we concluded that communications from the society journal now need to go to the membership from the society rather than from the journal as the risk of things getting trashed in everyone’s daily clean out is simply too high.

18. Interesting article about just how many academics have significant proportions of their publication lists in predatory journals.

    https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-derek-pyne-and-the-future-of-academic-freedom/

    Derek Pyne at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC, published research on this, and was suspended.

    “Prof. Pyne had his peer-reviewed study published last year in the University of Toronto’s respected Journal of Scholarly Publishing. His research found that 50 per cent of more than three dozen administrators and professors in one faculty at a particular Canadian university (later identified as TRU’s department of business and economics) had their careers furthered by getting work printed in outlets with highly questionable professional credentials.”

    In other words, if you piss off people in power who have bought their phony way into tenured positions, expect to be punished for telling the truth.

19. +

20. Sounds like a paper could be written on predator-prey relationships in the scientific publishing world.

21. I too get these spams every day. More than once the email says how impressed they were with an obituary I co-wrote, and couldn’t I please submit something similar. Computer generated, obviously, and the sad part is that some people must be submitting. Predatory journals are a threat to scientific integrity.

22. Your call, Jerry, but I wouldn’t confirm your address by writing back. (There’s a *slight* chance that not replying will, as they used to say, “take me offa list”.)

    That said, these places really tick me off. What to do about them?

23. I get a lot of such mails, and my only reply is “RUBBISH” in 72 point, bold red and underlined font.

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