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Status | Active |
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Founded | 2007 |
Founder | Huaibei Zhou |
Headquarters location | Wuhan, China |
Distribution | Worldwide |
Key people | Huaibei Zhou |
Publication types | Academic journals and books |
Nonfiction topics | Life sciences, economics, chemistry, computer science, environmental sciences, engineering, medicine, physics, mathematics, social sciences |
Owner(s) | Wuhan Erwan Culture Communication Co., Ltd. Wuhan Grand Technology Service Co., Ltd. |
No. of employees | About 160[ citation needed ] |
Official website | www |
Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP) is a predatory [1] [2] [3] academic publisher of open-access electronic journals, conference proceedings, and scientific anthologies that are considered to be of questionable quality. [4] [5] [6] As of December 2014 [update] , it offered 244 English-language open-access journals in the areas of science, technology, business, economy, and medicine. [7]
The company has been accused of using email spam to solicit papers for submission. [8] Although it has an address in southern California, according to Jeffrey Beall it is a Chinese operation. [8] In 2014 there was a mass resignation of the editorial board of one of the company's journals, Advances in Anthropology, with the outgoing editor-in-chief saying of the publisher "For them it was only about making money. We were simply their 'front'." [9]
According to its website, SCIRP publishes fee-based open-access journals (Gold OA). [10] Payments are incurred per article published. Authors are permitted to archive their work (Green OA). Preprint, postprint, and the publisher's PDF version may be used. [11] According to the society's website, journals published are fully open access, with reuse rights based on CC BY or CC BY-NC.[ citation needed ]
SCIRP generated controversy in 2010 when it was found that its journals duplicated papers which had already been published elsewhere, without notification of or permission from the original author and of the copyright holder. [12] Several of these publications have subsequently been retracted. [5] Some of the journals had listed academics on their editorial boards without their permission or even knowledge, sometimes in fields very different from their own. [13] In 2012, one of its journals, Advances in Pure Mathematics, accepted a paper written by a parody generator; the paper was not published, but only due to its author's unwillingness to pay the publication fee. [14] The company has also been noted for the many unsolicited bulk emails it sends to academics about its journals. [8] [13]
In 2013, the Open Journal of Pediatrics, a SCIRP journal, published a study which concluded that the number of babies born with thyroid problems in the western United States increased by 16 percent in 2011 compared to 2010, after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. The study has been criticized for not taking into account the fact that 2010 was a year with an unusually low number of births with thyroid problems. SCIRP refused to print a letter criticizing the study, but offered to publish it as an article for a charge. [6]
The company has been included in a list of questionable open access publishers, [15] [16] according to Jeffrey Beall's criteria. [17] Beall states that "This publisher exists for two reasons. First, it exists to exploit the author-pays Open Access model to generate revenue, and second, it serves as an easy place for foreign (chiefly Chinese) authors to publish overseas and increase their academic status." He acknowledges that its fees are relatively low, describing this as "a strategy that increases article submissions," and that "it has attracted some quality article submissions. Nevertheless, it is really a vanity press." [8]
Further controversy was generated by a mass resignation of the editorial board of one of the company's journals, Advances in Anthropology, in 2014. According to the former editor-in-chief, Fatimah Jackson, it was motivated by failures to include the editorial board in the journal's review process, and by "consistent and flagrant unethical breaches by the editorial staff in China", for whom publishing the journal "was only about making money." According to Beall, this was the first mass resignation from an open-access journal. [4]
In 2021 Cabells' Predatory Reports described SCIRP as a "well-known predatory publisher". [2] In the Norwegian Scientific Index the publisher and all of its journals have a rating of 0 (non-academic). [18] An academic study published in 2022 stated that SCIRP was "widely known to host 'fake journals'". [3]
The SCIRP website is operated by Wuhan Erwan Culture Communication Co., Ltd. [19] [20] Wuhan Erwan Culture Communication Co., Ltd is primarily owned by Wuhan Grand Technology Service Co., Ltd. [19] Engineering Information Institute, a member or source content provider of SCIRP, is also owned by Wuhan Erwan Culture Communication Co., Ltd. [19] [21]
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.
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.
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.
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.
Index Copernicus (IC) is an online database of user-contributed all information, including profiles of scientists, as well as of scientific institutions, publications and projects established in 1999 in Poland, and operated by Index Copernicus International. The database, named after Nicolaus Copernicus, has several assessment tools to track the impact of scientific works and publications, individual scientists, or research institutions. In addition to the productivity aspects, IC also offers the traditional abstracting and indexing of scientific publications.
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.
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 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, 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.
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.
Mikhail Blagosklonny is a scientist who studies cancer and aging. He is an adjunct faculty member at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York.
A mega journal is a peer-reviewed academic open access journal designed to be much larger than a traditional journal by exercising low selectivity among accepted articles. It was pioneered by PLOS ONE. This "very lucrative publishing model" was soon emulated by other publishers.
Predatory conferences or predatory meetings are meetings set up to appear as legitimate scientific conferences but which are exploitative as they do not provide proper editorial control over presentations, and advertising can include claims of involvement of prominent academics who are, in fact, uninvolved. They are an expansion of the predatory publishing business model, which involves the creation of academic publications built around an exploitative business model that generally involves charging publication fees to authors without providing the editorial and publishing services associated with legitimate journals.
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.
Cambridge Scholars Publishing (CSP) is an academic book publisher based in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. It is not affiliated with the University of Cambridge or Cambridge University Press. It was founded by a Cambridge alumnus. For the first owner it began as a hobby, publishing out-of-print Victorian novels. The early catalogue includes works by Dickens, Trollope, and Austen. In 2010, the company was bought by an entrepreneurial engineer (UK).
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: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)The Open Journal of Epidemiology is one of 99 journals that Cabells listed in its Predatory Reports database last month, and is published by a well-known predatory publisher known as SCIRP (Scientific Research Publishing) based in China.
... five publishers known to be predatory were likewise included in the sample, namely ... Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP) .... SCIRP and OMICS are widely known to host 'fake journals'