Founded | 1994 |
---|---|
Distribution | Global |
Publication types | Scientific journals, e-books |
No. of employees | 300 - 500 |
Official website | benthamscience |
Bentham Science Publishers is a company that publishes scientific, technical, and medical journals and e-books. It publishes over 120 subscription-based academic journals [1] and around 40 open access journals. [2]
As of 2023, 66 Bentham Science journals have received JCR impact factors, and they are a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics. [3] Bentham Open, its open access division, has received criticism for questionable peer-review practices as well as invitation spam; it was listed as a "potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open access publisher" in Jeffrey Beall's list of predatory publishers, [4] before the list went defunct.
Bentham was incorporated in 1994 by Atta-ur-Rahman and his friend Matthew Honan as a private business entity at the Sharjah Airport International Free Trade Zone in the United Arab Emirates. [5] An investigative profile from Sujag notes the publisher to have operated out of Pakistan — for the first six years, from the premises of International Center for Chemical and Biological Sciences and then, from private residential blocks at Karachi — in reality, under the banner of a tax-exempt proxy firm, owned by Rahman's sons. [5]
As of 2022, the publisher publishes more than 120 subscription-based journals, indexed in Scopus, Chemical Abstracts, MEDLINE, EMBASE, etc. [6] Bentham Open Access published more than 150 peer-reviewed, free-to-view online journals under Bentham Open.
Bentham Open journals claim to employ peer review; [7] however, a fake paper that was generated using SCIgen in 2009 was accepted for publication, though it was never officially published and the publisher has since contended that the acceptance was a play-along to catch the author. [8] [lower-alpha 1] The author, a graduate student at Cornell University, was motivated into the submission after being bombarded with unsolicited invitations to publish in Bentham's journals and offers to serve in their editorial boards for topics beyond his expertise. [10] In consequence, some editors quit the collaboration with Bentham. [9] [11] In 2013, the now-discontinued The Open Bioactive Compounds Journal again accepted a blatantly bogus paper submitted as part of the Who's Afraid of Peer Review? sting. [12]
Bentham Open has been accused of spamming scientists to become members of the editorial boards of its journals since 2008. [13] In a 2017 study of invitation spam by publishers, Bentham Open was noted to be a habitual offender. [14]
In 2009, the Bentham Open Science journal The Open Chemical Physics Journal published a study contending dust from the World Trade Center attacks contained "active nanothermite", [15] a well known 9/11 conspiracy theory. [16] The journal's editor-in-chief Marie-Paule Pileni claimed the article was published without her authorization, and resigned. [17] In a July 2009 review of Bentham Open for The Charleston Advisor , Jeffrey Beall accused Bentham Open of exploiting the Open Access model to make quick money, and rejected that they employed any meaningful peer-review. [18] Beall had since added Bentham Open to his list of "Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers". [4]
Medknow Publications also known as Wolters Kluwer Medknow or simply Medknow, is a publisher of academic journals on behalf of learned societies and associations. Previously an independent Indian publisher, Medknow is now part of within Wolters Kluwer's Health Division, and is part of Wolters Kluwer India.
Hindawi was a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journals active in scientific, technical, and medical (STM) literature. It was founded in 1997 in Cairo, Egypt, and purchased in 2021 for $298 million by John Wiley & Sons, a large US-based publishing company.
MDPI is a publisher of open-access scientific journals. It publishes over 390 peer-reviewed, open access journals. MDPI is among the largest publishers in the world in terms of journal article output, and is the largest publisher of open access articles.
Entropy is a monthly open access scientific journal covering research on all aspects of entropy and information theory. It was established in 1999 and is published by MDPI. The journal occasionally publishes special issues compiled by guest editors. The editor-in-chief is Kevin H. Knuth.
The African Journal of Traditional, Complementary and Alternative Medicines is a peer-reviewed open access medical journal covering research on medicinal plants, traditional medicine, complementary alternative medicine, and food and agricultural technologies. It is included on Jeffrey Beall's list of "Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access journals".
e-Century Publishing Corporation is a publisher of seventeen open access scientific journals based in Madison, Wisconsin. 11 of them are indexed in the Web of Science, including the American Journal of Translational Research, the American Journal of Cancer Research, the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, and the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Pathology. The publisher was included on Beall's list before it was taken down in 2017.
Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP) is a predatory academic publisher of open-access electronic journals, conference proceedings, and scientific anthologies that are considered to be of questionable quality. As of December 2014, it offered 244 English-language open-access journals in the areas of science, technology, business, economy, and medicine.
Frontiers in Psychology is a peer-reviewed open-access academic journal covering all aspects of psychology. It was established in 2010 and is published by Frontiers Media, a controversial company that is included in Jeffrey Beall's list of "potential, possible, or probable predatory publishers". The editor-in-chief is Axel Cleeremans.
The Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) is a non-profit trade association of open access journal and book publishers. Having started with an exclusive focus on open access journals, it has since expanded its activities to include matters pertaining to open access books and open scholarly infrastructure.
OMICS Publishing Group is a predatory publisher of open access academic journals. It started publishing its first journal in 2008. By 2015, it claimed over 700 journals, although about half of them were defunct. Its subsidiaries and brands include Allied Academies, Conference Series LLC LTD, EuroSciCon LTD, Hilaris Publishing, iMedPub LTD, International Online Medical Council (IOMC), Longdom Publishing SL, Meetings International, Prime Scholars, Pulsus Group, Research & Reviews, SciTechnol, Trade Science Inc, Life Science Events, Walsh Medical Media, and IT Medical Team.
Oncotarget is a primarily oncology-focused, peer-reviewed, open access journal. The journal was established in 2010 and is published by Impact Journals. The editors-in-chief are Mikhail Blagosklonny and Andrei V. Gudkov.
Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model, where the journal or publisher prioritizes self-interest at the expense of scholarship. It is characterized by misleading information, deviates from the standard peer review process, is highly non-transparent, and often utilizes aggressive solicitation practices.
"Who's Afraid of Peer Review?" is an article written by Science correspondent John Bohannon that describes his investigation of peer review among fee-charging open-access journals. Between January and August 2013, Bohannon submitted fake scientific papers to 304 journals owned by fee-charging open access publishers. The papers, writes Bohannon, "were designed with such grave and obvious scientific flaws that they should have been rejected immediately by editors and peer reviewers", but 60% of the journals accepted them. The article and associated data were published in the 4 October 2013 issue of Science as open access.
Jeffrey Beall is an American librarian and library scientist who drew attention to "predatory open access publishing", a term he coined, and created Beall's list, a list of potentially predatory open-access publishers. He is a critic of the open access publishing movement and particularly how predatory publishers use the open access concept, and is known for his blog Scholarly Open Access. He has also written on this topic in The Charleston Advisor, in Nature, in Learned Publishing, and elsewhere.
The International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology (IJACT) is a publication which has been described as a predatory open access journal—a publication which has some of the surface attributes of a benign open access journal but is actually an exploitative and deceptive corruption of that model, operating as a disreputable vanity press with little scholarly value.
The International Archives of Medicine is an open access medical journal covering all aspects of medicine. It was established in 2008 and published by BioMed Central until the end of 2014. Starting in 2015, the journal is being published by iMed.pub, the official publisher of the Internet Medical Society, and restructured as a megajournal on all areas of medicine. The journal was abstracted and indexed from 2009 until its delisting in 2015 in Scopus. The editor-in-chief is Ricardo Correa.
Aging is a bimonthly peer-reviewed open access bio-medical journal covering research on all aspects of gerontology. The journal was established in 2009 and is published by Impact Journals. The editors-in-chief are Jan Vijg, David Andrew Sinclair, Vera Gorbunova, Judith Campisi, and Mikhail V. Blagosklonny.
Imaging in Medicine is a quarterly peer-reviewed open access medical journal. It covers medical imaging, radiation therapy, radiology, and basic imaging and nuclear medicine. The journal was established in 2009 by Future Medicine. It now is published by Open Access Journals, an imprint of the Pulsus Group, which is on Jeffrey Beall's list of "Potential, possible, or probable" predatory open-access publishers after being acquired by the OMICS Publishing Group in 2016.
Jacobs Publishers is a publisher of various international journals based in Hyderabad, India. Jacobs Publishers has been included on Beall's List of predatory open-access publishers and has faced other criticisms of its publishing practices.