Diverse links

Here are some links that need documenting:

• Journal Accepts Paper Reading “Get Me Off Your F[...] Mailing List”
  Not only was the paper plagiarized and still had the names of the original authors, it should have been abundantly clear that this was not an academic paper worthy of publication. That did not stop the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology (already listed on Jeffrey Beale's list of predatory publishers) from accepting this paper found "excellent" by the peer reviewers that was to be published soon after receipt of the handling fee of $ 150...
• Spears: How my fake science paper earned me a shot at an editor's job
  Same song, second verse. Who cares who you are or if you are a plagiarist, just send the review as soon as possible, okay? And would you like to be an editor?
• A case of plagiarism by a professor of philosophy at the University of Tehran, Iran is widely discussed.  
• In Spain, a politician was found to have plagiarized in his dissertation ( [Levante EMV 1 - 2 ] - [Valencia Plaza])  as well as a professor [abc.es].
• A high-ranking Swiss public official in the Bundesamt für Kultur, now retired, pretended to have a doctorate for over 30 years. The Tagesanzeiger wonders if, since he was the person deciding which institutions would get money, no one cared.
• Back in October there was a bit of kerfluffle at the LMU in Munich, Germany, about an applicant for a professorship said to have plagiarized his application lecture. 
• Retraction Watch found this gem of a journal: "Article which was reviewed & approved by EB member with lowest plagiarism will only be allow to published." Seems rather similar to a Springer journal recently encountered: "The Protein Journal will reject without consideration any submission that has a similarity score of 45% or more."
• And finally, another highlight from Retraction Watch about a professor plagiarizing from his grad students in Canada. The professor defends his actions by publicly insulting the grad student.

There will be more, I'm afraid, to come. 

Identifying Scam Publishers

I happened on an oldish site today, Preditors & Editors, that contains a listing of things for writers to look out for when they are considering publishing. Many of their general rules for spotting a scam publisher fit nicely to vanity publishers that abound in the scientific realm:

• Openly advertises for writers in print or online publications or both.
• The publisher claims that it's seeking to publish first-time authors.
• Openly claims that it's not a vanity or subsidy publisher.
• Claims that it has a new business model that will bring success, but never explains why successful publishers aren't utilizing it.
• Claims that the established publishers and published writers are trying to block new writers from being published.
  [...]

It's a long list, followed by a list of properties of a scam literary agent. They also have a list of publishers and other useful links for writers. They also appear to be under legal attack from people who don't like what David Kuzminski, the owner of the site, published.

German Libraries Avoiding Fake Publishers

This blog has reported a number of times on what I term fake or write-only publishers (1 - 2 - 3). I am happy to report that German university libraries are fighting back - they are trying to avoid purchasing expensive rubbish.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung reports that after some libraries realized that they were purchasing printed copies of material from the Wikipedia or dodgy bachelor's theses at outrageous prices, they have begun only purchasing the books - often badly produced print-on-demand volumes - with the possibility of returning the book. And they are keeping lists of the subpublishers that are springing up to disguise who is really behind the publishers. If a book is to be ordered from such a publisher, the librarians are asking back if the person ordering the book is aware of the common practices of these publishers.

There is a long list of publishers that engage in practices like this:

• Verlag VDM (Verlag Dr. Müller),  Saarbrücken
• Alphascript Publishing 
• Betascript Publishing
• Doyen Verlag
• Verlag Classic Edition
• Südwestdeutscher Verlag für Hochschulschriften
• Lambert Academic Publishing

• (General)Books LLC
• Bucher LLC
• GRIN-Verlag

There are a lot of good sources online about these publishers (these are mostly in German):

General:

• Tobias Bolsmann: „Verlage verkaufen Kopien von Wikipedia-Texten.“ In: Der Westen. Portal der WAZ-Mediengruppe, Oktober 2010
• Corinna Nohn: „Der große Wikineppp. Dubiose Online-Lexika“ In: sueddeutsche.de vom 30.09.2010
• Thomas Thiel: “Der Marketplace soll es richten. Wikipedia und Amazon”, 27. September 2010

VDM and their imprints:

• Persönliche Seite des Wikipedia-Nutzers “Prime Hunter” in der engl. Wikipedia, mit zahlreichen Links, September 2010 
• Jürger Plieninger im netbib-Blog zu Lambert AP, August 2010
• Blog von Chris Rand: „The odd tale of Alphascript Publishing and Betascript Publishing”, Februar 2010
• Victoria Strauss, The Writer Beware Blogs zu VDM, September 2009
• Klaus Graf: “Mehr zum Verlag Dr. Müller“, samt Reaktion des Verlegers, Juni 2009
• Meike Strüber: „Einband fürs Ego: Noch nie war es so einfach, die eigene Abschlussarbeit nach dem Studium als Buch herauszubringen. Die stolzen Autoren werden jedoch in den seltensten Fällen reich und berühmt“, in: sueddeutsche.de vom 11. Juli 2008
• Diskussion in INETBIB (mit den Schwerpunkten Autorenanwerbung des Verlags, Pflichtexemplarrecht), Januar 2008:
• Blog des ehem. Fachreferenten Philosophie J.G. Eberhardt (UB Erlangen)  zum Thema Reprints des VDM-Verlags, Februar 2007 – Mai 2008; inkl. Drohungen des Verlags: Siehe auch: URL: http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/4442450/

(General) Books LLC and Bucher LLC

• Andreas Weigel: „Denken Sie, dass Sie das Buch verbessern kann?“, September 2010    
• Andreas Weigel: „Zweifelhafte „James Joyce“-Publikation mit Austriaca-Schwerpunkt“ [with many pictures of the publication], September 2010
• Discussion in the German Wikipedia about the copyright questions involved with publications from Bucher LLC
• Diskussion von Urheberrechtsfragen in der dtspr. Wikipedia:

 Hopefully, more and more libraries will realize that these are not legitimate publishers, and quit ordering books from them.

Thanks to C.W. for the linklist!

And another one

Last year I was "asked" to contribute to a journal that I considered fake, Modern Applied Science, and I blogged about it.

This year it is not so generic, they refer to a paper that I published online a few years ago:

Dear Debora Weber-Wulff,
I read your article of “Learning Software Engineering via Internet” on line.I know that you are an expert in this area.

I am Cindy,the editor of "International Education Studies (IES)" ,which is a peer-reviewed, open access journal, published by Canadian Center of Science and Education.The scopes of the journal include, but not limited to, the following topic areas: education, training and educational administration.The journal is published in both printed and online versions. The online version is free access and download.Please click on "about" above to see information on editorial board, policies, submissions etc.

It’s my honor to invite you to contribute manuscripts to our journal. Please find more details athttp://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ies/index/.

If you have any questions, please contact with me at: [].

It is appreciated if you could share this information with your colleagues and associates. Thank you.

Best Regards,
Cindy Xu
Editor
International Education Studies
Canadian Center of Science and Education
*************************************
Add: 4915 Bathurst St. Unit #209-309, Toronto, ON. M2R 1X9

I love the language misuse and the missing commas after periods.  Google now has Streetview here, so we can see that the Canadian Center of Science and Education is in a shopping center:

Finchurch Plaza, 4915 Bathurst St., Toronto, Ontario

and it has interesting neighbors: an Asian  grocery, a Subway, a nail studio, a dentist, a florist, a shoe repair, a podiatrist. And not to forget the Buck Stop. 

Is this a legitimate scientific endeavor? I think not.

Spam Publishers

A former student alerted me to this company this morning, VDM publishers, operating out of Mauritius. She was written to on Xing, a business social platform, in German by the "Acquisition Editor" from VDM Publishing House, Ltd. He noted that he had happened upon her bachelor's thesis while browsing the web at our school and found her thesis interesting. He requests that she send him her email address so he can send her information about publishing her scientific work. She was quite thrilled by this, but luckily Skyped me first to ask it it was permissible to publish her thesis herself. Now, I used the Vienna Development Method (VDM) in my doctoral thesis, so I thought I would just check up on what kind of publisher it is, as I generally smell a rat at cold calls like this.

Oh dear, just as I suspected: This is what I normally call a "fake publisher", but should perhaps call a spam publisher, "Verlag Dr. Müller". The Wikipedia article linked to above references an article in the Berner Zeitung from 2009 about this publishing house that purports to publish scientific books under diverse imprints such as Alphascript, Betascript, FastBook Publishing, Fromm Verlag, Saarbrücker Verlag für Rechtswissenschaften, Lambert Academic Publishing, etc. etc.

What they seem to do is to pick up free content, such as the Wikipedia, or bot around looking for students that have just completed their theses, and ask if they may publish them as books, offering a free copy of the book to the author. And since the books have an ISBN number (although the country code for the publications is from Algeria or other exotic places), this sounds like a great idea to a young graduate. I checked to see how you find the correct title for her thesis at our school - the only way is to use the public OPAC at the library, but there is a helpful search function there for theses from our school that can then be listed in the order received into the library.

The books are offered at a stiff price (30-60 €) via online booksellers such as Amazon. There are lots of "novels" such as the works of "Lambert M. Surhone, Miriam T. Timpledon, and Susan F. Marseken", who have collectively published > 81214 (!) books on subjects from M16 Rifles to Sine Waves. Many include - according to the cover - "High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles![sic]", and for only 34,99 € instead of 36,99 €. What a deal for content you can have for free and current on the Wikipedia itself. The "abstract" of these books is often the first few sentences from the Wikipedia article.

I just checked amazon.com, there "Lambert M. Surhone" has 230,556 publications this morning. Wow, that's impressive. I've found a German blog post on this from April 2010 in basicthinking.de and two US bloggers, chrisrand.com and Real-Time Rendering. According to Chris Rand, Amazon had stated that the books are being "retired". No sign of that in January 2011. Real-Time Rendering suggest writing a bot to publish reviews on all of the books that they are Wikipedia copies - any takers?

This is just one more example of why the "simple" system that is being instituted in Germany to measure publishing output "quality" in Germany is broken. Only publications with an ISBN or an ISSN are deemed legitimate, in Berlin anyway. Anyone can - and does - publish anything at a print-on-demand publisher. And who can tell from the fancy names that this is not a high-quality publisher?

And for the customers? Caveat emptor.