Scholarly Journals of Professional Science Publishing No Really I Swear

Ever so often I get scientific spam. It falls into three categories:

• advertisements for bogus or predatory conferences,
• invitations to submit articles to bogus or predatory open access journals, or
• requests to lend such journals a veneer of legitimacy by participating in a sham review process.

Today's e-mail appears to fall into the second category. As explained here before, and discussed in much greater detail at this blog by another researcher, these "journals" are websites (often run by somebody in Nigeria, India or Pakistan) that will "publish", online only, manuscripts submitted to them in exchange for a fee. It may be a match made in heaven for those who produce such poor quality manuscripts that they cannot publish in real journals, but any competent scientist would only be wasting their time and money.

In this case, the contact information leads to Nigeria. The "publisher" hosts a small fleet of "journals" on their website:

• Scholarly Journal of Biological Science
• Scholarly Journal of Agricultural Science
• Scholarly Journal of Biotechnology
• Scholarly Journal of Medicine
• Scholarly Journal of Business Administration
• Scholarly Journal of Mathematics and Computer Science
• Scholarly Journal of Engineering Research
• Scholarly Journal of Physical and Applied Chemistry
• Scholarly Journal of Education
• Scholarly Journal of Science Research and Essay

Such creativity in the naming department - sounds legit, doesn't it? I especially like Science Research and Essay. But it gets better.

Apart from the overall poor English and various minor oversights on their website and in the e-mail I received, all of which does not quite give the impression of professionalism, look at the section on 'handling fees':

Authors of articles are required to pay a fair handling fee for processing their articles.  However, there are no submission charges. Authors are required to make payment ONLY after their manuscript have been accepted for publication. 

Handling fee for the various journals is stated in the ‘Instruction for Author’.

Just one instruction for one author? Well, there is no link to Instruction for Author but there is a section called Manuscript Preparation. Let's check it out:

It continues beyond this screenshot, of course, but there is no mention of the size of the handling fee. Perhaps they want it to be a surprise? What there is, however, is a reference to a journal called ASTRA:

Since ASTRA has a double-blind peer-review-process, we kindly ask you to remove the author initials and last names, full institutional addresses of all authors, and the correspondence email.

Wait, what? Isn't this Scholarly Journal of Whatever Pops Into My Head? A bit of googling shows that ASTRA is short for Astrophysics and Space Sciences Transactions, the open access journal of the German Arbeitsgemeinschaft Extraterrestrische Forschung, a professional organization of astronomers and astrophysicists. Compare the start of their journal's instructions to authors:

In words:

Since ASTRA has a double-blind peer-review-process, we kindly ask you to remove the author initials and last names, full institutional addresses of all authors, and the correspondence email.

And compare the rest of the instructions, of course.

Yes, Scholarly Journals has merely copied and pasted another (legitimate) open access journal's instructions for authors and did not even bother to go over it again to delete the giveaway. I assume that is a good indication of the effort they would put into publication quality.