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.

Modern Applied Science - another Fake Journal?

I got this in my email the other day, with a request to pass it on to my associates and colleagues. As a friend pointed out, the verb "focus" when applied to such a variety of topics is amusing.

Dear Sir/Madam,
I am Susan Sun, the editor of Modern Applied Science which focuses on the fields of chemistry, management and economics, physics, mathematics and statistics, geology, engineering, environmental sciences and biology. And I know you are an expert in this field, so we would like to get paper submissions from you.

Please find more details at http://www.ccsenet.org/mas/.

If you have any questions, please contact with me at: mas@ccsenet.org

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

Thank you.

Note: We are recruiting reviewers for the journal, please find more details at: http://www.ccsenet.org/reviewer.html

Best Regards,

Susan Sun
Editor
Modern Applied Science
Canadian Center of Science and Education
*************************************
Add: 4915 Bathurst St. Unit #209-309, Toronto, ON. M2R 1X9, Canada
Tel: 1-416-208-4027
Fax: 1-416-208-4028
E-mail: mas@ccsenet.org
Website: www.ccsenet.org

The CCSE has a web site and publishes lots of journals. Its advertising page is on lots of blogs - but it is, if anything, a NGO with no official ties to the government of Canada.

The editor, Susan Sun, can be found with this gem published:

Recycling Economy and Sustainable Development
Susan Sun
Abstract

Economic development is the main theme of social progress. By recalling the economic development, the necessity and inevitability of sustainable development is fully demonstrated. With the acceleration of economic globalization, the influence for sustainable development is increasing. There is a complex opposite and united relationship between economic globalization and sustainable development. People are seeking a way to eliminate confrontation and get united. In social practice, we found that the recycling economy is the best way to achieve sustainable development, and it is an important embodiment of the economic, social and ecological sustainability.

Sounds like gobbelty-gook to me.

So how does one tell if a journal is legit? They have a web site! It's new, so no one has quoted it yet. But the very broad scope of the journal quite disturbs me and leads me to think that this is yet another fake journal. Does anyone have more information on this organization, beside their own online information that is all from March 2009 or later? Google maps points to a car lot for the address given. That would make it hard to get mail, I suppose...

Update: 2013-04-22: Link for the journals fixed

Fake Journals

Now we not only have fake conferences and invented publications. If you have enough money (as pharmaceutical companies do), you can just purchase your own fancy-schmancy, scientific-sounding journal from a reputable publisher. Or shall we say, previously reputable. Now that six of their thousands of journals have been identified as fakes, maybe we should just assume that the rest are also problematic and proceed to take our papers to Open Access journals.

But let's start at the top. Many blogs (such as bioethics.net) and The Scientist reported that pharmaceutical company Merck was behind the "Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine". It looked like a real journal. It had real-looking articles in it, although they were reprints or summaries of other journal's research, all strangely enough favorable about Merck products. Summer Johnson on the bioethics blog points out the problem with this:

What’s wrong with this is so obvious it doesn’t have to be argued for. What’s sad is that I’m sure many a primary care physician was given literature from Merck that said, “As published in Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, Fosamax outperforms all other medications….” Said doctor, or even the average researcher wouldn’t know that the journal is bogus. In fact, knowing that the journal is published by Elsevier gives it credibility!

Right. Elsevier used to be a respected name in scientific publishing. The Guardian quotes a spokesman as saying that the publisher does not consider this a journal, as it is a compilation of reprinted articles. Then why does it have the word "Journal" in its title?

Laika's MedLibLog goes on to explain how some of the articles that were reprinted got themselves published in the first place: the company sponsors the research, and then employees of the company offer manuscripts to the academic investigators, who put their name on the paper (and sometimes forget the footnote explaining who paid for the research). So we have a "journal" with reprints of ghostwritten articles.

The Scientist has now found 6 similar journals:

• the Australasian Journal of General Practice
• the Australasian Journal of Neurology
• the Australasian Journal of Cardiology
• the Australasian Journal of Clinical Pharmacy
• the Australasian Journal of Cardiovascular Medicine, and
  
• the Australasian Journal of Bone & Joint Medicine.
  

Elsevier would not tell The Scientist the names of the companies sponsoring these titles.

Yes, the mother company regrets what its Australia division has been up to. And the people responsible apparently don't work there any more.

But how can we know for sure that the next Elsevier journal that we hold in our hands is legit? That it declares all of its interests and who paid for and wrote the research?

Can we now declare the peer-review system for journal articles officially broken? Can we also quit counting number of articles and impact factors and just have people submit the 3 of 5 most important papers they have written when they are evaluated?

Oh, the Elsevier statement is linked from their home page....