Indian Academy of Sciences sends out an important alert
An undated alert has been published by the Indian Academy of Sciences (see Journals Overview), publisher of 12 scientific journals. This should be given attention, as it highlights a problem that exists globally, not just in India: theft and misuse of the names of legitimate journals. See further comments after the following quote:
"ALERT... It has come to our notice that the names of the Academy Journals are being misused, and fraudulent emails are being sent, inviting submissions to online predatory journals with the same titles. These email addresses are from domains such as Gmail, and are not from an institutional domain. The emails sent from the Academy will be from the domain 'ias.ac.in'. Please do not respond to requests coming from other email IDs, as we, at the Academy, do not use Gmail or any such mail servers."
Gina Kolata, writing in The New York Times (October 30th, 2017) reports that:
“Predatory publishing is becoming an organized industry,” wrote one group of critics in a paper in Nature. Many of these journals have names that closely resemble those of established publications, making them easily mistakable.... the journals often advertise on their websites that they are indexed by Google Scholar. Often that is correct — but Google Scholar does not vet the journals it indexes."
As a general aim, I am asking all members of the Research Cooperative to seek out and support genuine, legitimate journals created by legitimate academic organisations, or sincere researchers working closely with a group of actively-involved colleagues.
Dear Rose,
I think our first task is to find the journals that are already produced!
'Ranking' is less important than (1) editorial and reviewer support for a journal, (2) relevance, (3) readership, and (4) accessibility.
If authors and journals and authors can pay attention to the basic requirements for good academic publishing, the rankings will look after themselves!
Which is more important, the engine of a car, or the shiny hubcaps?! A journal with dusty hubcaps may have a fine engine!
Cheers, P.
In the Nort-east there are no obvious list of Journals. Our knowledge of what journals would benifit our reasearch goals and are accessible in terms of publishing is very limited. In this sense, perhaps a ranking system created by scholars themselves might be helpful. The questions remains what kind of criteria and who might initiate this endeavour.