by Greg Mayer

In yesterday’s New York Times article about the large judgment against a predatory journal publisher, there was a link to an earlier story about a “Scholarly Sting Operation”, in which an entirely fake academic, named “Anna O. Szust”, was created, and shopped around to various journals as an aspiring member of the editorial board, and managed to get on over 40 editorial boards, most of them for putative predatory journals (the rest for several open access journals). The details are even more frightening or amusing (or perhaps both), including asking for payments from Szust, and offers of profit sharing (“60% us 40% You”). Do read the original piece in Nature, and the New Yorker also has an interesting article on the affair.

I was interested to see what Szust was up to now. Her Twitter page, shut down by the investigators once the sting was complete, is still up, and appropriately labeled.

I also found on a quick search that she’s still on the editorial board of three journals: the Global Journal of Multidsiciplinary Studies, which may no longer exist; the International Journal of Art and Humanity Science, which seems not to have published anything since 2017, though it seems to still have a full website; and the Asian Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies, which is still fully functioning. Here’s the cover of this month’s issue:

Note that it professes to be “A double-blind peer reviewed monthly international journal”, and reports an “Impact Factor” and several indices, which, I suppose, it takes to be some measure of its quality.

The Journal‘s welcome page provides the following description:

Asian Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies (AJMS) is monthly international journal approved by published in English, Hindi & Marathi for scholars, practitioners, and students. The Journal welcomes original research articles, book reviews, commentaries, correspondence, review articles, technical notes, short communications, case study, books, thesis and dissertation relevant to the fields of Agricultural Science, Ayurved, Biochemistry, Biotechnology, Botany, Chemistry, Commerce, Computer Science, Economics, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Food Science, Geology, Geography, History, Horticulture, Library & Information Science, Linguistics, Literature, Management Studies, Mathematics, Medical Sciences, Microbiology, Molecular Biology, Nursing, Pharmacy, Physics, Social Science, Zoology. All research papers submitted to the journal will be double – blind peer reviewed referred by members of the editorial board.

and a list of where it is “Indexed”:

Asian Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies (AJMS) is included in different indexing agencies, J-Gate, Google Scholar, Directory of Research Journal Indexing, BASE – Bielefeld Academic Search Engine, International Impact Factor Services (IIFS), India Environment Portal etc.

A very revealing bit of information is on this page:

Last Date of Online Manuscript Submission: 20th April 2019
Date of Online Publication: 1st  May, 2019

I wonder how much double-blind peer-review can occur in 11days!