Science spammers constantly reaching for new lows

I received the following two messages on the same day, in fact they were sitting right next to each other in the inbox.

Surely this is sad. Is there no such thing as taking pride in one's work, even among spammers? Recently some people tried to defraud me, and of course that is annoying, but at least they put a lot of effort into it. I was impressed by how much information they had to accumulate to seem half-convincing. These guys, on the other hand, use such a simplistic bot to produce their mass-emails that it they are immediately recognisable as such.

Really the only thing sadder than these messages is that my spam filter is apparently still unable to understand that the keyword "greetings!!!!" is a certain indicator of spaminess.

MCDA spam

Ye gods, I got an absolute gem of science spam yesterday.

We wish you a happy new year.

Well, at least no greetings of the day, so that is good.

It's so pleasant to communicate with eminent people like you through this email.

Is it brown-nose day already?  I had not noticed.

I believe that your efforts will create the good reputation for my Journal. Our MCDA journal is in shortfall of one article to accomplish the issue. So, we request you to submit any type of article towards our journal. I would be highly obliged with your swift submission process. Hope you will support us.

And this is where it all falls over. Why does this spammer think that I should care about the reputation of their journal? If they were a car dealer, would they say, I believe that your purchase will increase my profits, I need another sale to make my target? As opposed to, say, stressing the price to performance ratio of the car. If they were a university recruiter, would they say, I believe that your enrolment would create the good reputation for my university? As opposed to, say, claiming that the already good reputation of their university would transfer onto the prospective student?

Well, maybe that is what they would do. But that is not how it works. I am not in sales, but even I know that if you are selling something you have to convince the prospective buyer that buying is in their interest, not only in yours.

Await your article submission.
Regards,
Emma Wright Š Modern Concepts & Developments in Agronomy (MCDA)
LLC, Third Avenue, 2nd floor, New York - 10016, USA

If this message is the English of an Emma Wright in New York I will not only eat my hat but a whole stack of them.

Also, just as an aside, the message did not even contain a link to the journal website!

It displays a level of incompetence so profound, so all-encompassingly fractal, that there is truly no hope for this spammer. How can anybody who is able to write an eMail without trying to eat the keyboard look at this spam message and think, yes, this is going to convince people that I am running a serious scientific journal?

The world is so confusing sometimes

When will we finally reach peak gibberish in science spam?

Dear Author,

Formatting as in original - an auspicious start.

Journal of Proteomics & Bioinformatics greets you a good day!!!!

That's a new one, but at least it isn't "greetings of the day". Also, by the way, I really don't understand why my spam filter cannot finally figure out that anything that has more than one exclamation mark in a row can be binned immediately.

We are in shortfall of articles for successful release of Volume 10, Issue 10.

See this circle? That is my circle of caring. The fact that this alleged journal cannot fill its issue is about 5,000 kilometers outside of my circle of caring. So...

Is it possible for you to support us with your transcript for this issue before 30th October?

What do they mean with "transcript", which is usually a sheet showing university marks (grades)? Do they not even know the word manuscript?

If this is a short notice please do send 3-4 pages Short Commentary or Mini Review, and hope that a 5 pages article will not take much time for an eminent like you.

What does this sentence even mean? Help?

Also it will be very kind of you if you can acknowledge the receipt of this email and give your opinion to our proposal.

Better not, because if I honestly gave my opinion of their proposal there would have to be some bad language involved.

Best wishes,
Susan Williams

As usual, if this was written by somebody actually called Susan Williams... oh, excuse me, Susan Williams, then I will not only eat my hat but a whole stack of hats.

---

In completely unrelated news, why does GBIF suddenly use hexagons?

This looks as if somebody tries to draw in more people who enjoy strategy computer games, but it seems a bit odd given that spatial studies generally use square grid cells, either equal area or degree-based.

Cogent Spam and, while we are at it, ARTOAJ spam

In the last two weeks several of the blogs I read have discussed an attempted 'hoax' publication that aimed to repeat for gender studies what Alan Sokal did for postmodern cultural studies in general when he made up a nonsense paper and got it published in a well-respected journal catering to that field. In the present case, Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay made up a deliberately nonsensical paper on the "conceptual penis as a social construct", but that is where the parallels end.

It seems as if they first submitted it to a relatively low ranking journal, were actually rejected, and then got it published in an even more obscure and, crucially, pay-to-play journal called Cogent Social Sciences. They then immediately went public explaining their hoax and declaring, "we suspected that gender studies is crippled academically by an overriding almost-religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil. On the evidence, our suspicion was justified". However, many people immediately pointed out it is not as easy as that.

They also, and actually first, discuss the problem of crappy pay-to-play journals, but as has been discussed elsewhere, we don't really get to use this experiment to prove two potential reasons why the paper was published at the same time. If it was published because Cogent Social Sciences is such a low quality journal that it will accept anything, then the stunt proves nothing about gender studies as a whole. Conversely, if the paper was published because the field of gender studies has no standards except the requirement to see maleness as evil, then it proves nothing about crappy publishers.

More concerning, however, seems to be the discussion that the 'hoax' has spawned. From a feminist perspective I have seen a blog post and an essay that both argued that the people celebrating it as a success can only be motivated by a hatred of feminism and a fear of women in power. I am not really sure where that comes from; the possibility should at least be entertained that the underlying motivation is the one that is stated, i.e. being fed up with postmodernist gibberish and the politicisation of academia.

On the other hand, I found it really frustrating how many people who are supposedly rationalists, skeptics, and generally science-savvy do not appear to understand at all the problem of crappy pay-to-play journals. Over and over, even in comments under articles that explained in detail what is going on here, people would write something to the effect of "but a social science journal accepted it, so there". Argh. If some guy operated a website called International Journal of Evolutionary Biology Research out of his garage, and a creationist paid him $200 in publication fee to get a nonsensical paper posted on that website, would that show that all of evolutionary biology is nonsense? Quite so. Then why the failure to appreciate the same problem in this case? Blind tribalism?

I was a bit torn at first when I had a look at the Cogent Open Access website myself. It looks much more professional than most obscure pay-to-play publishers I have seen so far, and I could at that moment not remember them spamming. Then again, I also never heard of that publisher before. Looking into a few papers they published in an area that I can judge I was not exactly overwhelmed, but okay. Just a few days ago, however, on some whim I looked into my junk mail folder, and what would I see but a spam eMail from Cogent Biology?

Again, it is not the worst I have seen, but let's count the ways in which it raises red flags for me:

1. Well, first of all, it is a spam message, randomly soliciting papers from huge numbers of researchers who did not sign up to receive these message. This is not a practice generally associated with serious publishers.
   
2. Promise of quick review and, in particular, suprisingly fast publication after acceptance.
   
3. Suspiciously broad scope of the journal.
   
4. Bragging about being 'indexed' in services that either are the usual suspects, or I have never heard of, or are mere utterly non-discriminating search engines like Google Scholar, as if any of that were a mark of quality.
   
5. Unprofessional random bolding, italicisation, and colouring of words across the text of the message.

Add "greetings of the day!" and two more font colours and it would be utterly standard for the field. In other words, this clinches it, at least for me: I think publishing the 'hoax' paper in Cogent Social Sciences demonstrates absolutely nothing about gender studies (and nothing that we didn't already know about publishing).

Note, by the way, that the two following statements are completely independent:

• This so-called hoax was a dud, and the people who celebrate it either don't understand its problems or exhibit a disconcerting failure of skepticism.
  
• Gender studies as currently practiced is largely bollocks.

It is entirely possible to believe both at the same time, although personally I do not consider myself qualified to have an opinion on the second statement. More to the point, even if the second statement could be proved beyond doubt, it would not at all disprove the first. It is curious how many people do not seem to appreciate that, as they appear to try to demonstrate the success of the hoax by pointing at completely different papers that they also consider ridiculous.

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While on the topic of science spam, on Monday I received a particularly hilarious instance:

Good Morning.....!

What a professional salutation.

Can we have your article for successful release of Volume 6 Issue 5 in our Journal?

Wait, what article are you talking about, specifically? Also: no.

In fact, we are in need of one article to accomplish the Issue prior 10th June; we hope that the single manuscript should be yours. If this is a short notice please do send 2 page opinion/mini review/case report, we hope 2 page article isn't time taken for eminent people like you.

So basically: send us whatever you want, we just want stuff!

Your trust in my efforts is the highest form of our motivation, 

Gibberish alert!

I believe in you that you are eminent manuscript brings out the best citation to our Journal.

I believe in you that you are poor at constructing English sentences. And this is just beautiful: they come right out and say that this is about what is best for their randomly capitalised "Journal" as opposed to what is best for science or the author. Ye gods.

Anticipate for your promising response.

Ding! Gibberish!

Regards,
Sophia Mathis

If that is really the name of the author of that message I will eat my hat.

Agricultural Research & Technology: Open Access Journal (ARTOAJ)

The names keep getting more ridiculous. I guess all the good ones are taken? Now for the finale:

*Note: Wanna get more citations for your articles publish with us as i-books, e-books & Videos.

"Wanna". Somebody thought they could emulate what a serious academic publisher would write and they came up with "wanna get more citations". The mind reels.

IJHSSIOMGWTFBBQ

There is so much science spam these days that a message has to be particularly remarkable to even register; mostly I just mark as junk or report without even thinking about them. But this one is a beauty.

Let's count the ways:

1. The message uses four different text colours (counting the links), several different font types, and more different font sizes than anybody in their right mind could consider tasteful.
   
2. The title - International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Invention - is likely among the top five most convoluted titles I have ever seen, and given the competition that is saying something.
   
3. The title does not make any sense either, but I guess that goes without saying.
   
4. The spammer did not even write their script to personalise the message. At least other spammers have it insert the name of the recipient, but this one merely reads "dear author/researcher". Lazy.
   
5. The first sentence randomly capitalises "international journal" and is poorly written.
   
6. The second sentence claims the journal is indexed in "major indexing" (major indexing what?) and then lists four names none of which I have ever heard of. So whatever they are, they are certainly not "major".
   
7. "IJHSSI follows the rapid publication process." So there is a rapid publication process, just one?
   
8. Like many other spammers, this one sets arbitrary paper submission deadlines, presumably to create a sense of urgency. Why would a journal, which by definition publishes regular issues, ever do that?
   
9. The sentence in bold and red is ungrammatical.
   
10. The spammer does not even bother to invent a name for their imaginary editor-in-chief IJHSSI. Remember Robest Pual Ashcraft? That was fun. But no, here we only get a generic title.
    
11. Note that there is very conspicuously no mention of the article processing fees in this message.

I think this is another, ahem, "journal" that I will pass on.

More adventures in science spammer land

Thus writeth the Open Journal of Plant Science, whose mass eMail is totally not spam, oh no sir:

Please Note: This is not a spam message and has been sent to you because of your eminence in the field.

Alright then.

Greetings for the day!

If you don't want to be taken for a spammer, perhaps try not to begin the eMail like every other science spammer.

Peertechz was launched this Journal to support the Open Access in the way of publishing manuscripts, new technics and methods in science.

I was decided any papers not to submit to journals whose editors not write coherent sentence.

Open Journal of Plant Science published articles are freely available online to the readers for life time.

They don't specify, but presumably they mean the life time of their website, right?

The journal encourages the authors to publish their manuscripts in a large Open Access network: Peertechz and its looking for the manuscripts from selective scientists like you who have enormously contributed to the scientific community.

It would really be grateful to you if you can send us energetic and enthusiastic submission to successfully release the upcoming issue. Send us any type of article to increase the visibility of the Open Journal of Plant Science.

Sadly I don't think that I have ever had a manuscript that I would have called 'energetic', be it as an author or as a reviewer. How do they differ from non-energetic ones?

If you are interested, please respond us on or before 48 hours and send your paper by July 15th, 2016.

I have seen that with quite a few journal spammers before. They have a very close deadline and then a more distant deadline in the very same sentence. So which is it? Why would an author have to respond in two days? I strongly suspect that they would also accept manuscripts on 15 July from people who didn't contact them tomorrow. In fact if we are talking a regularly appearing journal here then it should accept manuscripts on 16 July, so why claim that there are deadlines at all?

We are looking forward to have valuable submission from you soon.

Darauf kannst Du lange warten.

---

I also recently saw an example of what comes out at the other end of the process. One of my publication alerts notified me that I had been cited, and the paper was curious enough that I followed the link. It is

Gayathiri et al. 2016. A review: potential pharmacological uses of natural products from Laminaceae. International Journal of Pharma Research & Review 5: 21-34.

Yes, "Laminaceae". Seven authors have written an alleged review article on the mint family Lamiaceae and have consistently misspelled its name throughout the entire manuscript. Ah no, I lie; they spelled it "laiminace" in the keywords, so scratch consistently.

This alone is just... indescribable. Seriously, how can somebody write a review about something and not know how it is spelled? How can seven authors and presumably at least one editor miss that, even in that journal?

Also, my name is misspelled in the reference list, the species I am cited about is misspelled, and as for the text itself, let's just quote a single sentence from the abstract.

Although, medicinal plants continue provide a new drug leads in drug discovery, and numerous challenges are encountered in procurement and selection of plant materials, screening method and the scale up of active compound, hence this brief review work presents a study of the importance of natural products, especially those derived from higher plants and aims to the highlight the pharmacological significant of Laminaceae family in terms of drug development.

Yay for science!

---

On Jeffrey Beall's blog, which has already covered criteria for (1) what it calls predatory journals and (2) fake impact factors, a discussion has been started about criteria to similarly classify conferences as "predatory". Suggestions by contributor James McCrostie are, in short:

1. Any kind of deceit, such as hiding that the conference is for-profit or claiming that the organisers are based in a different country than they really are;
2. No or inadequate peer review, including review only by the conference organisers; later fast acceptance of submitted talks is also mentioned;
3. High conference fees;
4. Overly broad scope;
5. Connections to companies known for running "predatory" journals;
6. "Regularly accepting papers by undergraduates";
7. Advertising the conference like a holiday;
8. Spamming, especially to random people outside of the relevant field of science;
9. People are allowed to give multiple presentations at the same conference.

(Numbers mine, the original list is more extensive and not numbered.)

I have received quite a few spam eMails advertising in broken but hyperbolic English for obviously crappy conferences, often from fields I have no relation to whatsoever, such as fertiliser research or medicine. This is clearly a problem, although as with the journals I would argue that no competent scientist should ever fall for them. People should know what the relevant conferences in their field are and be able to delete these spam eMails at a glance. I assume they mostly prey on the desperate.

Still, I can see how a list of dodgy journals, for example, is useful to people outside of a field or totally outside of science, to help gauge if somebody's CV is inflated. I am just not so sure that it is quite as easy to develop useful criteria for recognising dodgy conferences as it is for journals.

Points 1, 4, 5, 7, and 8 are clearly valid. Deceit, spamming and being run by a crappy journal company are obvious alarm bells, and overly broad scope makes a conference practically useless for networking and learning. But the others? Not so much.

Maybe it is different in other fields, but I do not think that I have ever participated in a professional conference that peer reviewed the abstract submissions except for whether they fit into the scope of the meeting. In other words, the organisers of a systematic botany conference will look over the abstract, and if it were on theology or law or perhaps obviously pseudoscience they would kick it out, but that's that. The closest I have ever seen is that the committee would demote some talk submissions that were deemed less important to posters, and even that only at the very most prestigious meetings.

High fees? Well that is in the eye of the beholder I guess, but some legitimate conferences can be terribly pricey.

"Regularly accepting papers by undergraduates"? What? Are there seriously fields of research where the quality of work doesn't matter but only one's status and age? Luckily I am not working in one of them.

Similarly, what is the problem with giving two talks at the same meeting? At most conferences in my field there are two or three people who do that. Nobody has ever had an issue with that as long as they don't do it every time, and as long as nobody gives five or something like that.

Perhaps practices are just too different between the various fields of science and scholarship to find easy agreement on this.

Zcience Zpam

Once more I have received a piece of science spam that I find outstanding in its silliness.

Special Greetings!

Are there people somewhere in the world who talk like that? You come to work in an office in Hyderabad, and instead of "శుభోదయం" people say, "ప్రత్యేక శుభాకాంక్షలు"?

We are pleased to announce a regular issue entitled "Biological Research and Development" and we would like to invite you to submit a manuscript to the regular issue for possible publication in the Peertechz Journal of Biological Research and Development

Yez, Peertechz. Zat zounds like zerious Zcience.

The idea is to present originally contributed research, review, case reports papers, mini review, short communication or any perspective from leading researchers in the field of Peertechz Journal of Biological Research and Development Focus.

So, anything really.

Peertechz Journal of Biological Research and Development is a peer reviewed open access journal, aims to publish high quality basic and clinical research in all the disciplines related.

Article View Options:

Peertechz providing more compatible and useful formats such as PDF, Fulltext, ePub format, Audio Article, PubReader View, etc.

I did not know that 'full text', for example, is a file format. Learn something new every day.

We request your continues support towards the growth of the Journal success.
We look forward to seek your positive response.

I think at this stage we have given up on the whole idea of writing meaningful sentences and arrived at empty flowery phrases.

Please Note: This is not a spam message and has been sent to you because of your eminence in the field.

Ahahaha. The definition of spam in the internet context is unsolicited mass eMail. This is is unsolicited mass mailing. Do the maz, er, math.

This email and any attachment may contain private and confidential information. Do not share without Peertechz.com's approval.

Perhaps somebody who doesn't want the confidential information contained in "special greetings" shared shouldn't send it out to thousands of people as spam.

Science spam the umpteenth

Just when I thought spam mails from for-profit "journals" had gotten a bit more professional looking lately, I get this:

If trying to look like a serious scientific publication is here, then the above spam message is... somewhere outside the local group of galaxies, I think?

As for the claim that indexed journals are often considered to be higher quality than non-indexed ones, that is true as far as it goes. Unfortunately, Google Scholar is not really a selective indexing service but a search engine, and I have never heard of any of the others.

Yet more funny science spam

Most of them are caught by the spam filters now, and most of the ones that make it through are unremarkable in their mediocrity, but the following two caught my eye:

JACOBS PUBLISHERS - Let your wisdom enkindle others

Is it too much to ask that they avoid gibberish at least in the company motto?

Warm greetings from Jacobs Publishers!

Sometimes I wonder what language it is that they get these flowery greetings from; other spammers write "greetings of the day" or similar. Is it Punjabi, or perhaps Yoruba? Whatever it is, it doesn't sound unpleasant.

We introduce ourselves as Jacobs Publishers, initiated to serve the scientific community. It is an Open access publishing group that publishes peer-reviewed articles related to different aspects of Medical, Life Sciences, Pharma, Chemistry and Engineering. We have initiated a Journal called Jacobs Journal of Environmental Sciences. With relentless efforts of our Editorial team, we have initiated Inaugural Edition for our Jacobs Journal of Environmental Sciences.

Somebody here really, really likes the word initiated - and could probably use a Thesaurus.

We are planning to release the edition in the month of April, 2015.  On this Occasion, we request you to submit your Research Work as manuscripts to our journal, we would request you to invite your colleagues, experts to submit their manuscripts. Manuscript submissions expected date March 31st, 2015.

Request, on the other hand, does not sound as polite any more.

Authors are requested to pay 199 USD as publication charges for Inaugural edition. Payment could be done only after the completion of Peer Review process and acceptance by our esteemed Editorial Board Members.

This is at least surprisingly honest. Many competitors hide the fees until a paper has been submitted.

Regards
Amy Alethia
Jacobs Journal of Environmental Sciences
Jacobs Publishers
9600 Great Hills
Trail # 150 w
Austin, Texas

Yeah, right. If this message is the English of somebody from the USA then I am the emperor of China.

The second one is below the fold. Content advice: may trigger seizures.

A new low in science spam

Science spammers sometimes use scripts to mine journals or article databases for authors' contact details and then generate automatic spam. That saves them a lot of work, of course, but one has to wonder about the efficiency of that approach because the results are so bizarre and off-putting.

Behold:

Dear [my name]; [name of co-author]; [name of co-author]; [name of co-author]; [name of co-author]; [name of senior author],

Once you published a paper titled [name of our paper] in [name of the journal] . With such attractive theme [what follows are the keywords of our article] Cell size; chromosome; flow cytometry; genome size; guard cell size; ploidy, the article is so outstanding. It shows your professional and rigorous attitude. On behalf of the academic world, we appreciate your contribution to the research filed [sic!] very much. And we wonder if you have any new progress or you are doing any new study about your interested field.

Science Publishing Group [link], who [sic!] publishes Journals, Special Issues, Books and Conference Proceedings, now sincerely invites you to contribute your new articles to the website.
[another link]

Submit Your Latest Research

New progress of your latest research
New study in your research field
A view for the new research trends

Please submit your new papers via:  [another link]

Advantages to Publish with SciencePG

Peer Review: Effective and professional
High Visibility: Up to 40,000 visitors per day
Open Access: Open to the public free of charge
Low APC: Article Processing Charge ranges from 70 to 270USD
Abstracting and Indexing: WorldCat, CrossRef, JournalSeek, CASSI, etc.

If you are doing some new study, please kindly notify us. And we are looking forward to your participation.

It is even worse because all the fields that were filled in by the script are in italics in the original (like the keywords above), making it even easier to see what is going on. So sad.

Another brilliant piece of science spam

Lately I get the feeling that, on average, scientific spam trolling for paper submissions to poor quality, for-profit journals gets somewhat sleeker and more professional looking. And perhaps I have now blocked so many of these spammers that I get less of the really obvious ones.

But sometimes a real howler still gets through. Look at this beauty:

That is very forward of them...

As mentioned previously I get a lot of science spam soliciting the submission of manuscripts to some fifth rate for-profit journals, as probably does everybody in science. Still, this is probably a first for me: They have gone to the trouble of getting themselves set up in Editorial Manager, a legitimate manuscript management system also used by many good journals. And then they actually already registered an account for me, with username and password and all.

This is most unusual. Generally the decent journals that you want to publish in sit there waiting for you to sign up and submit. If they do set up an account for you it is because they want you to peer-review for them. The bogus journals, however, are normally happy with submission of the manuscript as an e-mail attachment. The approach taken in the spam message above is kind of half-half, and thus a bit weird; it looks a bit more professional, but at the same time it betrays their desperation to get somebody to submit something, anything, so that they can earn a few bucks, something that would be beneath professional scientific journals.

And of course, how can you take a journal serious that spams a systematic botanist with a solicitation for articles in proteomics?

Another good one

Because I show a "level of intricacy in my work" which makes the journal "even more proud", they believe that my works "should be known to the mankind of science". Aha. No idea why I should "capitulate" my manuscript though. In terms of the language, this is one of the worst journal spam messages I have ever seen. Perhaps the chap who runs this business from a garage in Pakistan or Nigeria or whatever should consider taking an introductory English course before pretending to be a scientific publisher?

Oh, and peer review of only seven days from submission to publication? Yeah, right...

Scottish journal of EVERYTHING

One of the things often pointed out by Jeffrey Beall is that questionable publishers like to give their for-profit journals very wide scope. They presumably do so in the hope of being able to earn article processing fees from as many areas of research as possible.

Yesterday I received another scientific spam e-mail that takes the cake in this regard. Behold the call for papers from the Scottish Journal of Arts, Social Sciences and Scientific Studies:

Okay, the first thing one notices is the green ink. But apart from that, the funniest aspect is the ridonculously long list of areas of research that is given as the scope of the journal. It is an alphabetic list of everything they could come up with. Botany and dance; philosophy and finance. Yup, that sounds legit, where do I sign up?

The name that they invented for the supposed managing editor is also pretty interesting, by the way. Robest Pual Ashcraft. I guess they were going for Robert Paul Ashcroft but put a typo into every word? So I may be mistaken but this could be an indication of something being off; would not be surprised to learn the journal is really run out of a garage in Pakistan or Nigeria.

Some fresh science spam

Admittedly I currently seem to get overwhelmingly sexually oriented spam, but there is also still a steady trickle of science spam. Some of it is simply ridiculous.

Garish colours. Unprofessional layout. Weird grammar. Grandiose claims. They have the whole package.

Again: I can kind of understand how professionally run vanity presses work, but why do these "publishers" expect anybody who is capable of writing a manuscript without trying to eat the keyboard to be stupid enough to submit their paper to them? Does that really work? These e-mails just don't look at all convincing.

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.

Failures and virtues of peer review

For a few days now, scientists have been discussing a small experiment conducted by a Science correspondent. He invented several variations on a bogus study in cancer research that contained several fundamental flaws and sent them out to 304 open access journals. 255 of them made a decision, and of those, 157 (or slightly more than 60%) accepted them.

Predictably, this experiment is being discussed along what we might call partisan lines. Those skeptical of the OA model see this as one more illustration of the problems of a system in which journals earn their money based on the number of accepted papers, pretty much regardless of their quality. Those advocating the OA model consider the affair a piece of propaganda for the traditional commercial publishing industry and stress that the experiment did not feature a control group of subscription based journals to see if they would have a lower acceptance rate.

I have already written about my concerns about the OA model so I will not repeat myself here. Note simply that I would very much prefer a system in which the rainbow press of science would be seen for what it is, in which all major journals are run as non-profit public utilities, and in which the results of scientific research are as available to the public as access to publishing venues is available to those who cannot afford $1,300 in article processing fees. I am merely worried about the incentives publishers operate under when using the OA model.

Instead, I wonder about the general issue of peer review. To express his opinion that the problem is not with OA but with peer review in general, Michael Eisen uses his linked blog post to call peer review a "joke", and similar sentiments are being expressed elsewhere. Others stress that this process is the gold standard that allows us to distinguish real scholarship from crankery. What gives?

Where to submit a manuscript

In the past few weeks I have repeatedly poked fun at science spam advertising poor quality for-profit "journals", and I have cited an article that claimed it would become difficult for some universities to evaluate scientists' resumes due to the meteoric rise of legit-sounding pretend-journals. I really do not "get" any of this.

That is to say, I do not get why a significant number of people would be willing or foolish enough to submit their manuscripts to pretend-journals, by extension how these pretend-journals can be profitable enough to the spammers for them to continue spamming (many of these "journals" have few to no articles and sometimes the few articles they have are plagiarized from elsewhere so presumably they cannot earn a lot of fees), and finally why anybody would find it hard to know the good journals in their field.

When you start out as a scientist (or scholar) you generally obtain a decent university education and write your thesis under a hopefully competent supervisor. The supervisor will be able to teach you not only how to write a decent paper but also to what journal to submit it. By extension, they will teach you what the good journals in the field are and what kind of "publication strategy" is expected of you if you want to become a career scientist/scholar in the field. In addition to your supervisor, can talk with other colleagues and learn from them. Finally, the papers you needed to read to prepare for your thesis as well as the reference list of said thesis will also give you a clear idea of where the relevant literature in your field is published.

More funny science spam

Ye gods, I wonder when we will pass peak ridiculous.

An editorial "manger" advises me to "always publish work in journals not on webpages as publication in journal have value in carrier". Next time I want to have something of value in a carrier I will consider these wise words. Also, by my count, the message uses nine different font colors, including three shades of green, and four different fonts. Stay classy, Earth Journal Publishing Group!

About a month ago the New York Times ran an article on predatory open access publishers that gives a good overview of the situation. A few remarks:

But some researchers are now raising the alarm about what they see as the proliferation of online journals that will print seemingly anything for a fee. They warn that nonexperts doing online research will have trouble distinguishing credible research from junk. “Most people don’t know the journal universe,” Dr. Goodman said. “They will not know from a journal’s title if it is for real or not."

Researchers also say that universities are facing new challenges in assessing the résumés of academics. Are the publications they list in highly competitive journals or ones masquerading as such?

It is easy to believe the first part - surely one cannot expect somebody from outside the field to know the good journals. But in my own area I know nearly all the relevant journals, and I surely know how to judge a scientist's output by looking at the names of the journals in their publication list. Are they getting into the ones that publish high-quality research? Are they taking the path of least resistance, always submitting to the same two or three journals, one of them published by their own employer? And the names of predatory open access journals have a kind of method to them that makes them relatively easy to spot in most cases. If it is the Journal of XYZ, it is most likely legitimate. If the name is something convoluted like International Research Journal of XYZ your alarm bells should be going off. So if you let resumes be evaluated by a competent peer of the scientists in question you should have no problems there.

At the time of my reading, the first reader's comment to the article is this:

This article gives the false impression that charging academic authors to publish is unusual, or limited to dubious upstart journals. In fact, the vast majority of academic journals, including the most respected ones in many fields, have long charged authors to publish, and reaped substantial profit from enforcing such charges. This is the bread and butter profit of many respected publishing houses. Publishing academic papers costs money, but since they are read by almost nobody, a charge the reader approach (even with libraries as the main 'readers') does not work. Thus, academics pay to publish their research, just like bad novelists do. Of course this payment is generally covered by their government grants, so in fact it is the taxpayer that pays in the end.

That is a fairly odd view of things. I have no great love for the profit-making of certain science publishers, and yes, ultimately the taxpayer finances all non-profit research. Well, duh. Perhaps it would indeed be better to have scientific journals treated as utilities, financed directly from taxes and run as non-profits.

But at least in my area traditional, non-open-access publishing is predominantly financed by journal subscription fees paid by the libraries and not through fees paid by the authors. There are some caveats: Some society journals offer free publication to members but demand page charges from non-members. Some journals demand page charges above a certain page count of your article. And generally all journals will publish greyscale figures for free but demand an additional charge for color figures. But these fees are usually quite reasonable and/or easily avoided: become a member of the society or chose a different journal, write more concisely, use greyscale figures. The real cost is on the side of the reader.

That is just the point of the movement towards open access publishing, after all, with its advantage of allowing the public to access all the science it has financed. But, it will have to be admitted, this move also comes with the attendant problem of shifting the commercial publishers' incentives towards publishing as many articles as possible instead of only the best, a problem that reaches its epitome in the predatory publishers discussed in the linked article.

Well, maybe the reader who made this comment comes from an area where traditional publishing works very differently than in biology.

This science spam is getting ridiculous

There was a time when all the spam e-mails I received were the normal, mundane kind, advertising sildenafil citrate, websites supposedly showing pictures or movies of people without their clothes, bargain watches, and of course deals on the lines of "I am the widow of a Nigerian banker and I will send you $4 million if you send me $10,000 first".

That changed, if I am not mistaken, when I participated in one specific conference in 2011. The organizers must have put the details of all participants, including their work e-mail addresses, onto the web and from there they must have ended up in the mailing lists of scientific spammers. This type of spam has been mentioned on this blog before - e-mails inviting the recipient to register for some for-profit conference or a predatory for-profit online only journal. The latter are more often than not willing to "publish" whatever nonsense you send them in exchange for a fee. The blog Scholarly Open Access helpfully documents their dubious practices, including a recent not entirely surprising case in which an open access journal simply disappeared, deleting all the articles authors had paid for to get "published" there. Really, don't waste your manuscripts on outfits like these.

Anyway, I feel that these spam e-mails are getting ever more frequent and stupider. Here are just three from the last few days, indeed two of them appeared in my inbox only today.