Who Are These People?

The more I looked into it, the more discouraged I got.

The subject line to the email read: The Journal of Leadership, Management and Organizational Studies invites you to join its Advisory Board.  Naturally, I was intrigued.

But the email itself turned out to be boilerplate from an outfit calling itself "Scientific Journals International."  It leads,

SJI (the parent company of The Journal of Leadership, Management and Organizational Studies) has assembled the most prestigious and extensive Editorial and Advisory Board in the world, representing scholars from Yale, Oxford, Harvard, Cambridge, MIT, Columbia and hundreds of universities from around the world.

And indeed, the editorial advisory board listing is long, with people from prestigious universities with impressive titles -- an Associate Vice-Chancellor from UT-Austin, a Research Scientist from Berkeley, an Associate VP from the University of Florida, an Associate Provost at Tufts and another Associate Provost from Rice -- thirty-seven individuals altogether.

The managerial advisory board is similarly impressive and the editorial review board listing for the different disciplines (SJI "publishes" journals across all fields) contains hundreds of names.

My first clue that something was amiss comes in the 2nd paragraph of the email:

The volunteer Advisory Board provides advice and guidance for the ongoing development of SJI. The members receive periodic emails about the developments of various SJI journals.  There are no regular responsibilities for the Advisory Board members.  Occasionally, you will receive an email that requests your input on new ideas, decisions or changes in the policies, procedures and guidelines of SJI.  If you feel that the issue is not in your area of interest (since SJI publishes journals in all disciplines), or if you do not have the time, you can simply disregard the message. 

What a deal!  List my membership on the advisory board on my CV, and then ignore all of the messages that I get from them.

Nowhere on the website could I find any indication of who is actually behind these journals.  There's a business address in St. Cloud, Minnesota, but no one is named.

I starting looking into the various journals -- there are many.  Turns out that very few of them have actually published any articles.  Click on a journal title and most of them will say: "Coming soon..."  As soon as they get some submissions, I suppose.

So what's the scam?  Open access, I'm sorry to say.   The opening page reeks of a high-minded dedication to assisting  "researchers, writers and artists to cope with the publish or perish reality in the academia."  They promise rapid turnaround and quick peer review.

Of course, they have to charge a processing fee.  The section on "Why We Charge A Processing Fee," which can be found under the submission guidelines for each journal is perhaps the most interesting part of the entire site.  It includes a summary of the "open access movement" and a very helpful listing of the various granting agencies that allow use of funds to cover article processing charges.  They point out that their processing charge is much lower than what various other open access publishers charge -- just $99.95 (add $99.95 for each additional author).   Somehow, I don't think they're viewing this as an incentive to limit the number of authors per paper.

Oh, and they're also looking for investors.  Just click on the helpful link.

It's got to be the open access movement's worst nightmare, living proof of the most hysterical charges leveled by the most rabid opponents.  Do the people who have signed on to these advisory boards think that they're supporting open access by lending credence to this?  I suppose I can give a break to some non-US junior scientist who hasn't gotten proper mentoring on publishing norms, but somebody with an Associate Provost title?!

Oh, I suppose I could be completely mistaken -- it could be that the people hidden behind the curtain are idealists who actually believe everything they say on their home page, that their peer review process is as rigorous as any of the prestigious journals in the fields that they cover, and that the papers being published are splendid contributions to science that any journal would be proud to have.

And that they're just too humble to put their own names on the masthead.  They'd rather that the credit goes to all of those paragons of academic virtue who've signed on to their volunteer advisory boards.

Comments

[Lynn]

There is a very well-established journal of a strikingly similar name published by an equally well-respected publishing company: The Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies published by Sage. I would be willing to bet that the other titles published by "Scientific Journals International" have knock-off titles as well. It would be very easy to confuse almost anyone but those who pay very close attention to the publishing industry. And who wouldn't want the prestige of serving on one of these outstanding editorial boards?

I also note that ALL of the journals published by SJI seem to have the same ISSN 1556-6757. Quite a multi-disciplinary outfit! WorldCat has a record for this ISSN and indicates that "Global Commerce & Communication" out of St. Cloud MN is the publisher. So I looked them up - they are into everything from intellectual property to Web Design to dating services. For a good chuckle, go to http://www.gcchq.com/. They seem to have a number of "overriding passions".

[Bruce the Almighty]

I particularly like the dating agency - passion at an affordable cost....

[Todd]

I received a similar invitation out of the blue. It did seem odd, so in doing some background research on the organization, I came across your posting. The more I've looked, the more troubled I've become. One of their sub-businesses on invention submission (oddly enough, also charging $99.95 per idea!) has a page about the company: http://www.newideatrade.com/about_us.htm

Interestingly, it lists all of the places they're registered, BBB, D&B, even their business license. As Hamlet said, they "doth protest too much, methinks."

Certification is the most critical aspect of scholarly publishing. And having a 20-page list of non-participating participants doesn't equal quality peer review. I didn't look through the content, but I'd be very wary if I were a contributor or partcipant.

Thanks for the post - it reinforced my early thinking.

[Dag Hjermann]

Thanks a lot for this post. I just got a similar initation and did not really know what to think until I found this page and saw that someone had done some "research" on this dubious organization. Their idea seems to be that if you create enough journals, quite a few people will tricked into paying the $99.95 per author publication fee.

[Gunther Eysenbach]

Good post. Yes, for the open access movement (and I am a publisher of an open access journal myself [http://www.jmir.org]) such "black sheep" are an increasing problem (I describe another story at http://gunther-eysenbach.blogspot.com/2008/03/black-sheep-among-open-access-journals.html ). As much as there are "throw-away" shady non-open access journals there will also be publishers and individuals who abuse the generally positive feelings many have towards open access journals. I do hope that scientists make the distinction between shady operations such as this one and non-profit open access journals which try to abide by some basic ethical standards and which are selective in what they publish. As I mentioned in a comment to my post, perhaps some sort of certification or association of credible open access publishers is needed.

[Tom Roper]

A late comment on this, but had you heard of the court case being pursued by Ahmad Niaz of SJI against Richard Poynder? Sub judice, of course, but Peter Suber and Stefan Harnard have issued a carefully-worded statement:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/470-SuberHarnad-statement-in-support-of-the-investigative-work-of-Richard-Poynder.html
Happy Open Access Day!