Even my errata are valued publications! Yes, really...
Another illustration of the hillarious invitations by predatory journals
I have been interested in predatory journals for over five years, documenting the story of the mysterious rise of an unknown scholar to the top regions of Thomson Reuters (now Clarivate) Essential Science Indicators by publishing (and citing himself) in more than 40 publications in predatory journals in just two years. The white paper even led to prominent press coverage in the Australian. Not everyone understood the irony of the story and I even got someone emailing me for advice on how to imitate the author. Fascinated by the phenomenon of predatory journals, Nancy Adler and I decided to investigate it in a bit more detail, leading to a paper covered in my post Strange journal invitations popping up in my inbox every day.
In the past two years, I have seen the number of invitations to become editor or editorial board member of predatory journals grow with amazement. Emails are made more "personal" by referring to an actual published paper, which invariably has very little to do with the domain of the journal. This particular invitation at least referred to a journal in the same broad discipline, but had made the decision to invite me based on a careful evaluation and reading of an erratum to one of my papers. Wow! Never knew that even my errata were valued publications :-).
I represent Universe Scientific Publishing Pte. Ltd., an academic publishing company founded in 2011. After careful evaluation and reading your article published in Scientometrics entitled “Erratum to: Proof over promise: towards a more inclusive ranking of Dutch academics in Economics & Business”, we decided to send you this invitation. Please allow us to take up a few minutes of your time to introduce our publisher since this may be an opportunities for us to develop together.
Our journal, Finance and Market, is a new journal which urgently needs professional like you to join our editorial board and help and support the journal to a healthy grow. We have come out with a program that prioritizing the submissions from our editorial board members and continue enforcing on our strict peer-review process. This program, as part of the research program related to the growth pattern of international OA academic journals, is supported and partially financed by the hosting organization, Beijing Spring City Educational Publications Research Center. With this support, it allows us to reduce the OA article publishing charges from $800 to $150 (additional $50 applied if print version is required).
Related blog posts
- Nancy Adler: Daring to Care
- Strange journal invitations popping up in my inbox every day
- Proof over promise: a more inclusive ranking of academics
- How to get listed on the ESI ranking of highly cited authors
Copyright © 2022 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. Page last modified on Thu 2 Jun 2022 15:10
Anne-Wil Harzing is Emerita Professor of International Management at Middlesex University, London. She is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, a select group of distinguished AIB members who are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the scholarly development of the field of international business. In addition to her academic duties, she also maintains the Journal Quality List and is the driving force behind the popular Publish or Perish software program.
