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 is a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journals currently 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. The publisher has been classified as a predatory publisher. After almost 10,000 article retractions in 2023, Wiley announced that it would cease using the Hindawi brand.
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.
Allied Academies is a reportedly fraudulent corporation chartered under the laws of North Carolina. Its postal address is in London, United Kingdom. It presents itself as an association of scholars, with supporting and encouraging research and the sharing and exchange of knowledge as its stated aims. The organization consists of 30 affiliate academies, which provide awards to academics and publish academic journals both online and in hard copy for members. Since 2015 the organization has been listed on Jeffrey Beall's list of "potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers". It is in a partnership with OMICS Publishing Group which uses its website and logo. In 2018, OMICS owner Srinubabu Gedela declared that he had informed the Nevada court that Allied Academies was a subsidiary of OMICS International. During a conference in 2018, they falsely listed a prominent chemist among its organizing committee who had not agreed to this and was not affiliated with Allied Academies.
Bentham Science Publishers is a company that publishes scientific, technical, and medical journals and e-books. It publishes over 120 subscription-based academic journals and around 40 open access journals.
The World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology or WASET is a predatory publisher of open access academic journals. The publisher has been listed as a "potential, possible, or probable" predatory publisher by American library scientist Jeffrey Beall and is listed as such by the Max Planck Society and Stop Predatory Journals. WASET's estimated annual revenue in 2017 alone was over $4 million, with other estimates ranging from $8.9 million to $11.9 million for the years 2014 to 2019 combined.
John Bohannon is an American science journalist and scientist who is Director of Science at Primer, an artificial intelligence company headquartered in San Francisco, California. He is known for his career prior to Primer as a science journalist and Harvard University biologist, most notably with his "Gonzo Scientist" online series at Science Magazine and his creation of the annual "Dance Your PhD" contest. His investigative journalism work includes:
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, Longdom Publishing SL, Meetings International, Pulsus Group, Research & Reviews, SciTechnol, Trade Science Inc, and Life Science Events.
Frontiers Media SA is a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journals currently active in science, technology, and medicine. It was founded in 2007 by Kamila and Henry Markram. Frontiers is based in Lausanne, Switzerland, with other offices in the United Kingdom, Spain, and China. In 2022, Frontiers employed more than 1,400 people, across 14 countries. All Frontiers journals are published under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors while only superficially checking articles for quality and legitimacy, and without providing editorial and publishing services that legitimate academic journals provide, whether open access or not. The rejection rate of predatory journals is low, but seldom zero. The phenomenon of "open access predatory publishers" was first noticed by Jeffrey Beall, when he described "publishers that are ready to publish any article for payment". However, criticisms about the label "predatory" have been raised. A lengthy review of the controversy started by Beall appears in The Journal of Academic Librarianship.
Beall's List was a prominent list of predatory open-access publishers that was maintained by University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall on his blog Scholarly Open Access. The list aimed to document open-access publishers who did not perform real peer review, effectively publishing any article as long as the authors pay the article processing charge. Originally started as a personal endeavor in 2008, Beall's List became a widely followed piece of work by the mid-2010s. The list was used by scientists to identify exploitative publishers and detect publisher spam.
"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.
AME Publishing Company is an academic publishing company, which publishes medical journals and books. Founded in July 2009, it is currently headquartered in Hong Kong, with additional offices in Guangzhou, Changsha, Nanjing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Beijing, Taipei, and Hangzhou. Its name stands for "Academic Made Easy/Excellent/Enthusiastic". It has published over 50 medical journals, as well as 20 English-language books, 28 Chinese-language books, and 60 e-books.
Baishideng Publishing Group is a publisher of medical journals based in Pleasanton, California. It was established on January 15, 1993, and originally published only one journal: the Chinese-language Journal of New Digestology. Its second journal was the World Journal of Gastroenterology, originally launched in 1995 as the China National Journal of New Gastroenterology. As of 2017, the company published 43 journals, 42 in English and one in Chinese.
Science Publishing Group (SPG) is an open-access publisher of academic journals and books established in 2012. It has an address in New York City and many of its journals are named American Journal of..., but the company is actually based in Pakistan. The company has been criticized for predatory publishing practices. As of 2019, it publishes 430 journals in various fields.
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.
Kowsar is an STM publishing company which was founded in 2002 by S.M. Miri and Seyed-Moayed Alavian. Kowsar journals have been peer reviewed and are published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution License Non Commercial 4.0. The company is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics.
JSci Med Central is a publisher of various academic journals from Hyderabad, India. JSciMed Central has been included on Beall's List of potential predatory open-access publishers, and has faced other criticisms of its publishing practices.
