Hindawi (publisher)

Last updated
Hindawi
Hindawi.svg
Parent company Wiley
StatusActive
Founded1997 (1997)
FounderAhmed Hindawi
Country of originEgypt [1]
Headquarters location London [1]
DistributionWorldwide
Publication types Scientific journals
No. of employees42 (in 2019) [2]
Official website www.hindawi.com

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. [3]

Contents

By 2022, Hindawi was publishing over 250 journals, including 64 journals indexed within the Science Citation Index Expanded, and 1 journal indexed within the Social Sciences Citation Index, [4] with a total of 64 journals ranked with an impact factor. Since 2007, all of Hindawi's journals have been open access and published under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). [5]

The quality of peer review at a number of Hindawi journals has been the subject of criticism. In 2010, Hindawi was classified as a possible predatory publisher by Jeffrey Beall, but was removed following a successful appeal. [6] In 2023, Wiley announced after over 7000 article retractions in Hindawi journals related to the publication of articles originating from paper mills that it will cease using the Hindawi brand and will integrate Hindawi’s 200 remaining journals into its main portfolio. [7] [8] The Wiley CEO who initiated the Hindawi acquisition stepped down in the wake of those retractions. [9]

History

The Hindawi Publishing Corporation was founded in 1997 in Cairo by Ahmed Hindawi and his wife Nagwa Abdel-Mottaleb. [10] [11] [12] The company's first journal was the International Journal of Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences , which it acquired from a prior publisher. By 2006 Hindawi Publishing owned 48 journals and had about 220 employees, and published journals in the physical and life sciences and medical research. [12] In February 2007, Hindawi moved to a complete open access model on all of its journals. [13] [14] By 2007, Hindawi was publishing around 100 journals, 21 of which were ISI listed, and claimed to be second largest publisher in PubMed Central, an open access journal repository. Hindawi journals use a reviewing process that does not assign chief editors to its journals, has no hierarchy among editorial board members, and has no contractual relationship with the editorial board members. [15] The company had a 40% article acceptance rate. Article publication fees averaged $800, varying by journal and page count, being significantly less than prices charged by major open access competitors including BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science. [16]

Two corporations currently act under the name of Hindawi: Hindawi Limited, based in London, [17] and Hindawi Publishing Corporation (HPC), [18] based in Cairo. The original publishing company, Hindawi Publishing Corporation, was founded in Cairo in 1997 by Ahmed Hindawi and Nagwa Abdelmottaleb [19] and now acts merely as a publishing services provider to Hindawi Ltd. [1] Hindawi Ltd was founded in London in 2013 by Ahmed Hindawi and had acquired all the assets and intellectual property of Hindawi Publishing Corporation by 2017. [20]

In January, 2021, John Wiley & Sons acquired Hindawi Limited for an enterprise value of $298 million. [3]

In the fall of 2022, Hindawi announced the retraction of more than 500 articles in 16 of its scientific journals because of cheating involving some of its editors and peer reviewers. [21] By the end of 2023, the number of retractions in Hindawi journal had increased to over 7000 and Wiley announced that it would discontinue the Hindawi brand and operate the journals under a new approach. [8] The Wiley CEO who initiated the Hindawi acquisition stepped down in the wake of the bad news. [22]

Assessment of Hindawi journals

Between 2009 and 2011, the number of Hindawi journals nearly doubled, and Hindawi's output increased from 2,500 to 13,000 articles per year. [lower-alpha 1] By 2011, Hindawi was publishing 300 journals, [lower-alpha 1] and had a staff of over 450 people. [23] The growth of the company has come from publishing new start-up journals, as well as acquisitions of established journals [12] such as Psyche, an entomological journal founded in 1874. [24] Two major factors facilitating the company's growth have been the low labor costs and well-educated middle class of Cairo. [23] As of April 2019 Hindawi's publishing portfolio includes 233 journals. [25]

As of April 2023, the Norwegian Scientific Index lists 195 Hindawi journals, one of which are level X (dubious i.e. possibly predatory), 18 marked level 0 (not academic), the rest marked level 1 (standard academic). [26]

In March 2023, multiple Hindawi journals were delisted from the Web of Science for concerns with their editorial practices. [27]

Assessments and responses to controversial articles

In 2010, a subset of Hindawi journals were included in a list of suspected predatory open access publishers by Jeffrey Beall; however Beall later removed Hindawi from his list after re-evaluating the company, calling it a "borderline case". [28] Beall has also criticized Hindawi for representing the offshoring of scholarly publishing, [29] a view which has been criticized as neocolonialist. [30]

Some efforts to assess the editorial quality of the review process of Hindawi publications using sting operations have failed to uncover obvious problems. In 2013, two Hindawi journals (Chemotherapy Research and Practice and ISRN Oncology) were targeted in the Who's Afraid of Peer Review? sting operation, and both rejected the fake paper. [31] Similarly, in 2017, another Hindawi journal was included as a target of a sting operation with a Star Wars –themed fake research paper. It was submitted to Hindawi's journal Advances in Medicine, and the journal rejected the paper. [32]

In 2014, three Hindawi journals faced delisting from Journal Citation Reports for anomalous citation patterns, particularly within journal self-citations and an excess of between-journal reciprocal citations. The three journals include The Scientific World Journal , although the problems with this journal occurred partly before Hindawi acquired the journal. [33] Open access journalist Richard Poynder considered this incident anomalous in and of itself, [11] and Retraction Watch has noted that Hindawi's sanctions for authors who manipulate citations – including 3 year bans of author submissions – are stricter than those of many other journals. [34]

In 2015, after an internal investigation, Hindawi flagged 32 published papers for re-review due to three editors subverting the peer review process with fake email accounts. [35]

In an opinion written in 2016, academic publishing critic Leonid Schneider compared Hindawi to another open access publishing group Frontiers Media, concluding overall: "It seems therefore, the Egyptian Hindawi is a traditionally-operated academic publisher like any other, be it OA or subscription one." [36]

In 2018 a Hindawi journal, Journal of Environmental and Public Health, published an epidemiological paper on glioblastoma, none of the authors of which had academic appointments. [37] The paper was accompanied by a press release that overstated the results of the paper in media interviews by the authors, and exaggerated the importance of findings with respect to the hypothesis that cell phones are dangerous. [37] [38]

In December 2020, the Chinese Academy of Sciences published a list of journals that may suffer from issues of scientific quality and other risk characteristics. [39] There were four Hindawi group journals in the 65 journals given in its initial list. The list was updated in December 2021 and reduced to only 41 journals, of which six Hindawi journals were included: Complexity, Shock and Vibration, Advances in Civil Engineering, Scientific Programming, Discrete Dynamics in Nature and Society, Journal of Mathematics (list of Hindawi academic journals). [39]

In January 2023, Zhejiang Gongshang University (浙江工商大学) in Hangzhou, China, announced it would no longer include articles published in Hindawi, MDPI, and Frontiers journals when evaluating researcher performance. [40] [41]

In 2023, several concerns about the linkage of some Hindawi’s journals (e.g. Mathematical Problems in Engineering ) with research paper mills were noted. [42] [43] [44] After that, Wiley detected paper mill signs on 10-13 % of papers in Hindawi. [45]

Business model

Hindawi charges authors an article processing charge. [12] [46] The charges vary by journal and are lower on average than other large open-access publishers. [16] By 2012, the company had a profit margin of around 50%, higher than the 2008 average of 35% for commercial publishers. [47]

Most Hindawi journals do not have editors-in-chief, but rather have editorial boards consisting of staff and a volunteer board of 30 to 300 scholars. [23] There is some concern that this style may lead to lower quality output, [48] [49] or at least the potential for it. However, journalist Poynder states in the lead to an interview of Ahmed Hindawi, "there is no evidence that Hindawi's editorial approach, or the way in which it recruits authors, has had any serious consequences so far as the quality of its papers is concerned," although he notes that some articles contain poor copy-editing. [11] At least one Hindawi journal (Pain Research and Management [50] ) has an editor-in-chief.

Hindawi has also been criticized for its use of unsolicited e-mail, with some claiming it is the chief method of attracting manuscripts and editorial board members. [51] [52] [53] [54] However, others claim that e-mail spam from many publishers is increasing, with open access advocate Stevan Harnad of the University of Southampton stating that while the practice should be frowned upon:

I think it's true that Hindawi spams no more than other legitimate businesses and organizations spam today. That may not be an admirable standard but it's a realistic one. In this context, Hindawi's promotional messages don't deserve to be singled out for stigmatization. [11]

See also

Related Research Articles

Dove Medical Press is an academic publisher of open access peer-reviewed scientific and medical journals, with offices in Macclesfield, London, Princeton, New Jersey, and Auckland. In September 2017, Dove Medical Press was acquired by the Taylor and Francis Group.

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.

Pulsus Group is a health informatics and digital marketing company and publisher of scientific, technical, and medical literature. It was formed in 1984, primarily to publish peer-reviewed medical journals. As of 2016, Pulsus published 98 hybrid and full open-access journals, 15 of which had been adopted as the official publications of related medical societies. Pulsus Group also conducts conferences in association with scientific societies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bentham Science Publishers</span> Academic publishing company

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.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association</span> Industry association in scholarly publishing

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.

Academic journal publishing reform is the advocacy for changes in the way academic journals are created and distributed in the age of the Internet and the advent of electronic publishing. Since the rise of the Internet, people have organized campaigns to change the relationships among and between academic authors, their traditional distributors and their readership. Most of the discussion has centered on taking advantage of benefits offered by the Internet's capacity for widespread distribution of reading material.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OMICS Publishing Group</span> Discredited academic publishing company

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, Life Science Events, Walsh Medical Media, and IT Medical Team.

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.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Predatory publishing</span> Fraudulent business model for scientific publications

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Who's Afraid of Peer Review?</span> Science article by John Bohannon

"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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeffrey Beall</span> American librarian

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.

Neuropsychiatry is a quarterly peer-reviewed open access medical journal covering research on neuropsychiatry. The journal was established in 2011 and originally published by Future Medicine with Wayne Goodman and F. Markus Leweke serving as its founding editors-in-chief up to 2015. Under the Future Science imprint, the journal's impact factor ranged from 0.486 to 1.456 (2012-2015). Since 2016 it is published by Pulsus Group via its openaccessjournals.com imprint, which is on Jeffrey Beall's list of "potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers". According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal had a 2016 journal impact factor of 4.778. However, that impact factor was based on a total of 9 "citable items" in 2014, as no articles were deemed "citable" in subsequent years, and in 2018 the journal was omitted from the 2017 Journal Citation Reports.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Future Medicine</span> British academic publisher

Future Medicine is a privately owned company based in London, England, United Kingdom. It is part of Future Science Publishing Group, primarily to publish peer-reviewed medical journals. Future Medicine publishes hybrid and full open access journals.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Peters (publisher)</span> Biographies

Paul Harvey Peters is the non-Executive Board Chair of online conference software provider ExOrdo and from 2015 to 2021 was the chief executive Officer of the Open Access publisher Hindawi. He is past Chair of the Board of Crossref and was President of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) from 2013 to 2019. Peters is known for his work as an advocate for Open Access, open infrastructure for Open Science, and research integrity in the published literature.

References

  1. 1 2 based on projections from the first 8 months of 2011
  1. 1 2 3 "A 2018 update on Hindawi's Corporate Structure". about.hindawi.com. 2018-03-14. Retrieved 2019-04-02.
  2. "Meet the Team". about.hindawi.com. 2018-08-05. Retrieved 2019-04-02.
  3. 1 2 "Wiley Announces the Acquisition of Hindawi" (Press release). 2021-01-05.
  4. company, Web of Science Group, a Clarivate. "Web of Science Master Journal List". Web of Science Group, a Clarivate company. Retrieved 2022-11-23.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  5. "Hindawi Publishing Corporation - Open Access Memberships". 2013. Retrieved 2013-02-01.
  6. Butler, Declan (2013-03-01). "Investigating journals: The dark side of publishing". Nature. 495 (7442): 433–435. Bibcode:2013Natur.495..433B. doi: 10.1038/495433a . ISSN   1476-4687. PMID   23538810.
  7. "Paper mills are bribing editors at scholarly journals, Science investigation finds". Science. 2024-01-18. doi:10.1126/science.zrjehzt.
  8. 1 2 "Wiley to stop using "Hindawi" name amid $18 million revenue decline". Retraction Watch. 6 December 2023. Retrieved 2023-12-08.
  9. "Up to one in seven submissions to hundreds of Wiley journals flagged by new paper mill tool". Retraction Watch. March 2024. Retrieved March 17, 2024.
  10. Hindawi, Ahmed (2009-01-01). "2020: A Publishing Odyssey". Serials: The Journal for the Serials Community. 22 (2). Ubiquity Press, Ltd.: 99–103. doi: 10.1629/2299 . ISSN   0953-0460.
  11. 1 2 3 4 Poynder, Richard (September 17, 2012). "The OA Interviews: Ahmed Hindawi, founder of Hindawi Publishing Corporation" (PDF). Open and Shut?.
  12. 1 2 3 4 Shaw, Shelli (Sep 2006). "Hindawi Publishing: Catering to Open Access" (PDF). Information Today . Archived from the original (PDF) on 2009-07-11. Retrieved 2010-11-02.
  13. McClure, Marji (May 2008). "Case Study: Open Access Yields Solid Growth for Hindawi". Information Today. 25 (5): 1–50 (3p).
  14. Harris, Siân (April 2007). "Encouraging innovation". Research information. Archived from the original on 2010-08-18. Retrieved 2010-11-02.
  15. Schneider, Leonid (2016-02-15). "OA publishers Hindawi vs. Frontiers: similar, yet different". For Better Science. Retrieved 2021-10-31.
  16. 1 2 Brown, David J.; Boulderstone, Richard (2008). "Business Models as Drivers for Change". The Impact of Electronic Publishing: The Future for Libraries and Publishers (2nd ed.). Saur Verlag. ISBN   9783598115158.
  17. "HINDAWI LIMITED overview - Find and update company information - GOV.UK". find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk.
  18. "BUSINESS". www.zawya.com.
  19. Peters, Paul (2007). "Going all the way: how Hindawi became an open access publisher". Learned Publishing. 20 (3): 191–5. doi:10.1087/095315107X204049. S2CID   1835925.
  20. "A 2018 update on Hindawi's corporate structure". 2018-03-14.
  21. Miller HI, Young SS (January 31, 2023). "How Scientific is 'Peer-Reviewed' Science?". American Council on Science and Health . Retrieved April 3, 2023.
  22. "Up to one in seven submissions to hundreds of Wiley journals flagged by new paper mill tool". Retraction Watch. March 2024. Retrieved March 17, 2024.
  23. 1 2 3 Loy, Matthew (2011). Hindawi Publishing Corporation: Growing an Open-Access Contributor-Pays Business Model. Case Study Update 2011 (PDF) (Report). New York: Ithaka S+R.
  24. "Psyche- The Club Journal". The Cambridge Entomological Club. Retrieved 17 October 2014.
  25. "Journals". Hindawi Publishing Corporation. Retrieved 2 April 2019.
  26. "Publisher info (Hindawi Limited)". Norwegian Register / kanalregister.hkdir.no. Retrieved 21 February 2023.
  27. Quaderi, Nandita (20 March 2023). "Supporting integrity of the scholarly record: Our commitment to curation and selectivity in the Web of Science". Clarivate blog | Academia and Government. Retrieved 24 March 2023.
  28. Butler, Declan (2013). "Investigating journals: The dark side of publishing". Nature. 495 (7442): 433–5. Bibcode:2013Natur.495..433B. doi: 10.1038/495433a . PMID   23538810.
  29. Jeffrey Beall. "Hindawi's Profit Margin is Higher than Elsevier's – Scholarly Open Access". Scholarly Open Access. Archived from the original on 2015-03-07.
  30. Rob Virkar-Yates (May 16, 2013). "Are 'predatory' publishers an American export?". Analysis & Opinion. Research Information. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Europa Science Ltd.
  31. Bohannon, John (3 October 2013). "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?". Science. 342 (6154): 60–65. Bibcode:2013Sci...342...60B. doi:10.1126/science.342.6154.60. PMID   24092725.
  32. "Predatory Journals Hit By 'Star Wars' Sting". 2017-07-02. Retrieved 2019-04-02.
  33. "The Scientific World Journal Will Lose its Impact Factor — Again | Scholarly Open Access". Archived from the original on 2014-10-17.
  34. "A first? Papers retracted for citation manipulation". Retraction Watch . 2012-07-05. Retrieved 18 October 2014.
  35. "30+ papers flagged because editors may have "subverted the peer review process" with fake accounts". Retraction Watch. 2015-07-08. Retrieved 9 July 2015.
  36. Schneider, Leonid (2016-02-15). "OA publishers Hindawi vs. Frontiers: similar, yet different". For Better Science. Retrieved 2021-10-31.
  37. 1 2 "Expert reaction to paper looking at brain tumour incidence and lifestyle factors". Science Media Centre. May 3, 2018.
  38. Mazer, Benjamin (16 July 2018). "Bad Faith: When conspiracy theorists play academics and the media for fools". Science-Based Medicine.
  39. 1 2 CoS partition table team, Chinese Academy of Sciences (31 December 2020). "《国际期刊预警名单(试行)》正式发布 - "International Journal Early Warning List officially released (Trial)"". mp.weixin.qq. Retrieved 1 January 2022.
  40. ForeignFriends. "MDPI, Frontiers & Hindawi are blacklisted by a university". Weixin Official Accounts Platform. Retrieved 2023-01-27.
  41. "突发:一高校将Frontiers、MDPI、Hindawi三大OA出版社旗下所有期刊纳入黑名单!_社会科学_教育部_学科". www.sohu.com. Retrieved 2023-01-27.
  42. Kincaid (2023). "Nearly 20 Hindawi journals delisted from leading index amid concerns of papermill activity". Retraction Watch.
  43. "Norway demotes Hindawi journal after claims one published a stolen paper". Retraction Watch. 29 March 2023.
  44. "Wiley paused Hindawi special issues amid quality problems, lost $9 million in revenue". Retraction Watch. 9 March 2023.
  45. Oransky, Ivan (2024-03-14). "Up to one in seven submissions to hundreds of Wiley journals show signs of paper mill activity". Retraction Watch. Retrieved 2024-03-15.
  46. Kho, Nancy Davis (Dec 2010). "Hindawi Publishing: A Working OA Model" (PDF). Information Today .
  47. Van Noorden, Richard (27 March 2013). "Open access: The true cost of science publishing". Nature. 495 (7442): 426–429. Bibcode:2013Natur.495..426V. doi: 10.1038/495426a . PMID   23538808.
  48. Beall, Jeffrey (2013). "Predatory Publishers Threaten to Erode Scholarly Communication" (PDF). Science Editor. Retrieved 2 April 2019.
  49. "8 Ways to Identify a Questionable Open Access Journal". American Journal Experts. Retrieved 2019-04-02.
  50. Hindawi Publishing Corporation. Cairo. Retrieved on March 2, 2016.
  51. "Predatory Journals Hit by 'Star Wars' Sting". 2017-07-22.
  52. "Hindawi: Another Dodgy OA Publisher". Aardvarchaeology. 9 January 2013. Retrieved 22 June 2016.
  53. "Dear legitimate open-access publishers: stop spamming!". Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week. 4 June 2013. Retrieved 22 June 2016.
  54. Schneider, Leonid (2016-02-15). "OA publishers Hindawi vs. Frontiers: similar, yet different". For Better Science. Retrieved 2019-04-02.