Sience spam number the infinity

There is so much science spam these days that I comment only on the most atrocious eMails I get. Today is one of those occasions.

My inbox recently featured a message from an organization called "RRP" with a call for articles. The text was a charming all bold ca 14-16 pt (?) font in dark red on a bright blue background. I will keep that combination in mind for future PowerPoint presentations just in case I ever have the need to deliberately cause headaches and vomiting in my audience. The text ran as follows:

Dear Colleague [ my work eMail address ],

That is an interesting start. Not only are those square brackets in the original, making abundantly clear that this is a field into which an anonymous algorithm has pasted a list entry, they do not even use a name. They don't say, dear Joe Average, they say, dear [ joe.average@workplace.au ]. Is that supposed to impress anybody?

Call for Articles:
RRP ( http://rrpjournals.org/ ) is a well-known publisher and has Journals whose scopes and policies fit with yours.

The first half of that sentence is a blatant lie, and the second half is gibberish. I am not aware of having scopes. Can I get mediation against them somewhere?

We have done some WWW searches and came across one or more of your articles.

Gosh. Do you want a cookie for that? And again, you could at least make a half-hearted attempt at concealing that this is a spam message and that you have not actually looked into my research. "One or more" indeed.

So we believe you may be interested in publishing you valuable work in one/some of our journals.

Your are sadly mistaken. Please feel free to take that R and see if you might need it somewhere.

I briefly summarize what makes RRP Journals unique and desirable in the following sentences. Why our journals are unique and desirable:

1.) "RRP Journals" offers detailed feedback on all submitted manuscript. We do not just publish good research and review papers, we help authors grow.

You could increase the desirability of your journals, albeit probably at the cost of their uniqueness, by learning a bit more about English grammar. Also: randomly placing quotation marks around names? Always a nice touch. Sorry, do continue.

2.) "RRP Journals" has online manuscript tracking system. This allows authors to keep track of the status of/progress on their manuscripts any day any time.
3.) "RRP Journals" has article tracking system through which authors can keep track of their published articles, and know who read their articles. 

Is it time to say gosh again? I think you are confusing two things here: "unique" and "standard practice of most scientific journals". Look up what those terms mean.

4.) "RRP Journals" is currently bilingual in that we publish abstract s of all articles in both English and French. We hope to add two more languages in 2014.

Admittedly that is not a bad idea from the reader's perspective; not sure why it is supposed to be a selling point to prospective authors here.

5.) "RRP Journals" offers various forms of assistances to authors. If you require any form of help at any time, you can easily contact us through the form available here ( http://rrpjournals.org/contact_us ).

How pleasantly vague. It is, unfortunately, to be assumed that they are mostly interested in helping the author if they are unsure about where to pay the article processing fee or however else RRP call their publication charges.

We hope you will:
[A] submit ( http://goo.gl/c7La3p ) your valuable manuscript to us for possible publication in any of RRP Journals, and/or
[B] join our editorial board/become a peer-reviewer ( http://goo.gl/VMbiye ) for one/some of our Journals.

Yep, that's a sure sign we are dealing with a serious and professional publisher: mass-spamming random people with requests to join whatever editorial board they fancy. Isn't that how all the good journals do it?

I think we are done here.