Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Last updated

Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Cambridge Scholars Logo.png
StatusActive
Founded2001;23 years ago (2001)
Country of originUnited Kingdom
Headquarters location Newcastle upon Tyne, England
Nonfiction topicsScience, technology, medicine, business, transport and architecture
Owner(s)Graeme Nicol
Official website www.cambridgescholars.com

Cambridge Scholars Publishing (CSP) is an academic book publisher based in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. [1] It is not affiliated with the University of Cambridge or Cambridge University Press. It was founded by a Cambridge alumnus. [2] 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). [3]

Contents

The company publishes in health science, life science, physical science and social science. In 2018 it published 729 books. [4]

Journal publishing

The company previously published academic journals [5] including the discontinued titles Zambia Social Sciences Journal [6] and Review Journal of Political Philosophy. [7] However, as of 2020, Cambridge Scholars did not publish any journals/periodicals.

Reception

In 2017, David H. Kaye's Flaky Academic Journals noted that "the journals do not look stellar. No editorial boards are listed", [8] but journals are no longer published, and as of 2020, an editorial board of international scholars is now listed. [9] Cambridge Scholars made an official statement on the site in December 2018 entitled 'In Defense of Cambridge Scholars' [10] in which John Peters, an advisor to Cambridge Scholars Publishing, commented on the statements made on the site stating "There are no charges to publish. There is no requirement on authors for a buy-back in return for publication. Royalties are accrued to the author from the first sale of a title. Decisions to publish are not taken on likely sales or profitability (which is unusual in a commercial publisher). The commercial risk to publish rests entirely with CSP." [10]

Cambridge Scholars Publishing sends unsolicited emails to potential authors: "Many academics must have at least received an email asking them to publish their undergraduate, masters or PhD dissertations as long as they are a part of some online repository to which these entities have easy access." [11] In February 2018, it was added as a potentially predatory journal publisher to the update to Beall's List of potentially predatory journals or publishers, no longer maintained by Beall but by an anonymous European postdoctoral researcher. [12] [13] As of September 2023 the most recent changes shown on the list were in December 2021. [13] As of November 2023 a list published by Predatory Reports, "an organization made up of volunteer researchers who have been harmed by predatory publishers and want to help researchers identify trusted journals and publishers for their research", [14] lists Cambridge Scholars in its list of Predatory Publishers [15] and discusses it at length in a July 2023 news post which concludes that "Some studies name CSP as potentially predatory." [16]

History

The company was founded in 2001 [17] by former Cambridge University academics. It relocated to Newcastle when its founders moved to Durham University, [4] and was subsequently sold to a group of Newcastle-based business-people when the original owner left the UK in 2010. The company is now co-owned and managed by Graeme Nicol [18] who bought the company from the original owner in 2011. [19]

The Lady Stephenson Library, then known as Walker Library, in 2006 Welbeck Road and Walker Library - geograph.org.uk - 106628.jpg
The Lady Stephenson Library, then known as Walker Library, in 2006

Premises

The firm is based in the Lady Stephenson Library, a building that was commissioned in 1908 to house one of Newcastle's early public libraries, given to the city by William Haswell Stephenson and named for his wife Eliza Mary née Bond, who had died aged 67 in 1901. [20] The building is now the location of four registered companies. [21]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hindawi (publisher)</span> Scientific and medical journal publisher

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.

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.

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.

<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.

<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 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.

<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">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.

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.

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.

The Center for Promoting Ideas (CPI) is an organization that engages in predatory publishing. Run out of Bangladesh with a claimed office in New York, it publishes a number of journals that publish academic articles for payment, claiming they are "peer-reviewed and refereed". Like many predatory journals it operates under the guise of an open access model. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in 2018 that authors wired money to Bangladesh and sometimes never saw their paper published, or edited poorly. In addition, the CPI habitually lists unwitting academics as editors in chief or members of the editorial board, against their wishes.

Juniper Publishers is a publisher of various academic journals. It has a postal address in Irvine, California, USA, located in a residential neighborhood but has employees in Hyderabad, India. Juniper Publishers has been included on Beall's List of potential predatory open-access publishers, and has faced other criticisms of its publishing practices.

Herald Scholarly Open Access is a publisher of various academic journals. It has a postal address in Herndon, Virginia, United States, but is actually based in Hyderabad, India. Herald Scholarly Open Access has been included on Beall's List of potential predatory open-access publishers, and has faced other criticisms of its publishing practices.

The American Journal of Biomedical Science and Research is an open-access medical journal for scientific and technical research papers. It is published by BiomedGrid. The journal has been included on the updated Beall's List of potential predatory open-access journals, and has faced other criticisms of its publishing practices. In 2020, it published a fake scientific paper which claimed that a bat-like Pokémon sparked the spread of COVID-19 in a fictional city.

SciRes Literature LLC is a publisher of academic journals. It has a postal address in Middletown, Delaware, US, but is actually based in Hyderabad, India. It started its activities in 2015. The company uses an Open Access model of publishing, which charges the authors. Articles are distributed online and free of cost or other barriers. As of October 2022, none of its journals names a scientific editor-in-chief.

References

  1. ↑ Mills, David; Robinson, Natasha (2022). "Democratising Monograph Publishing or Preying on Researchers? Scholarly Recognition and Global 'Credibility Economies'". Science as Culture. 31 (2): 187–211. doi: 10.1080/09505431.2021.2005562 .
  2. ↑ "About Us". www.cambridgescholars.com. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Retrieved 10 April 2023. Founded in 2001 by former lecturers and researchers from the University of Cambridge ... Cambridge Scholars Publishing Limited is not affiliated to or associated with Cambridge University Press or the University of Cambridge.
  3. ↑ "Is Cambridge Scholars Publishing Predatory?". 28 July 2023. Retrieved 10 March 2022.
  4. 1 2 "Newsletter 1" (PDF). Cambridge Scholarly Publishing. Archived from the original (PDF) on 23 March 2020. Retrieved 31 December 2020.
  5. ↑ "The following is a list of series in progress". Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Archived from the original on 13 August 2013. Retrieved 7 April 2020.
  6. ↑ "Zambia Social Science Journal". www.cambridgescholars.com. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Archived from the original on 3 July 2020. Retrieved 7 April 2020.
  7. ↑ "Review Journal of Political Philosophy". Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Retrieved 7 April 2020.
  8. ↑ "Cambridge Scholars Publishing". Flaky Academic Journals. 2 September 2017. Retrieved 25 February 2019.
  9. ↑ "Meet our Editorial Advisors – Cambridge Scholars Publishing". cambridgescholars.com. Archived from the original on 3 December 2020. Retrieved 9 April 2021.
  10. 1 2 Kaye, D. H. (2 September 2017). "Flaky Academic Journals: Cambridge Scholars Publishing".
  11. ↑ "A Glimpse into the World of 'Predatory Publishing'". 8 October 2019. Retrieved 30 August 2022.
  12. ↑ "Beall's list of potential predatory journals and publishers: Update" . Retrieved 10 September 2023.
  13. 1 2 "Changelog". Beall's list of potential predatory journals and publishers. Retrieved 1 October 2023.
  14. ↑ The Predatory Reports team. "About us". Predatory Journals. Predatory Reports. Retrieved 12 November 2023.
  15. ↑ "The Predatory Publishers List (Part 1)". Predatory Journals. Predatory Reports. Retrieved 12 November 2023.
  16. ↑ "Is Cambridge Scholars Publishing Predatory?". Predatory Journals. Predatory Reports. 28 July 2023. Retrieved 12 November 2023.
  17. ↑ "Cambridge Scholars Publishing Ltd – Overview". find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk. UK: Companies House . Retrieved 19 August 2021.
  18. ↑ "CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING LTD – Officers". beta.companieshouse.gov.uk. UK: Companies House.
  19. ↑ Roncevic, Mirela (5 May 2020). "Interview with Graeme Nicol, Chief Executive of Cambridge Scholars Publishing". No Shelf Required.
  20. ↑ "William Haswell Stephenson (1836-1918), Businessman and Civic Leader". Philanthropy North East. Retrieved 28 March 2020.
  21. ↑ "Address profile: LADY STEPHENSON LIBRARY, WELBECK ROAD, NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE, NE6 2PA". www.companieshousedata.co.uk. UK: Companies House . Retrieved 28 March 2020.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.