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As Editor-in-Chief of Apollo Medicine, I'm excited to announce we're looking for passionate and experienced medical researchers to join our Editorial Board. Our DOAJ-indexed, multispeciality journal is dedicated to publishing impactful research that advances medical practice.
We're seeking individuals committed to quality, integrity, and open-access publishing. If you're ready to contribute your expertise and shape the future of medical publishing, I encourage you to reach out.
➡️ Learn more about Apollo Medicine: https://journals.sagepub.com/home/AOM
Please send your CV and a brief cover letter directly to me. I look forward to hearing from you!
#MedicalResearch #EditorialBoard #OpenAccess #DOAJ #MedicalJournals #CallForEditors #MedicalCommunity #ScholarlyPublishing
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Please send me your cv at raju.vaishya@gmail.com
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I recently came across Qeios, an open-access publishing platform that allows real-time publishing with open peer review. It seems like an innovative approach to scientific communication, but I’d love to hear from researchers who have used it.
  • What are the main advantages of publishing on Qeios compared to traditional journals?
  • Are there any limitations or challenges associated with using the platform?
  • How is the peer review process handled, and how does it compare to conventional models?
Any insights or experiences would be greatly appreciated!
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  1. Publish in High-Impact Journals: Target reputable and high-impact journals in your field. Research published in well-regarded journals is more likely to be read and cited.
  2. Optimize Your Title and Abstract: Use clear and descriptive titles and abstracts with relevant keywords. This increases discoverability in search engines and databases.
  3. Increase Visibility through Social Media: Share your research on platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and ResearchGate. Engaging with the academic community online can lead to more visibility and citations.
  4. Network at Conferences: Present your work at academic conferences. This not only promotes your research but also allows you to connect with other researchers who may cite your work.
  5. Open Access Publishing: Consider publishing in open access journals or making your research available through institutional repositories. Open access articles are often more accessible and can lead to higher citation rates.
  6. Engage in Collaborative Research: Collaborate with other researchers to broaden your network. Collaborative papers typically receive more citations due to the combined networks of authors.
  7. Create a Research Profile: Maintain an updated profile on platforms like Google Scholar, ORCID, and ResearchGate. This increases your discoverability and provides a central place for others to find your work.
  8. Share Your Data and Methods: Make your datasets and methodologies available for others to use. This can lead to citations from researchers who utilize your data in their own work.
  9. Cite Your Own Work: When appropriate, cite your previous research in new publications. This can help create a chain of citations linking your works together.
  10. Educate Others about Your Work: Write blog posts, create infographics, or give talks that explain your research to a broader audience. The more people know about your work, the more likely they are to cite it.
Are there other methods or other methods that can be used to search for studies that can be add?
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The article I want to share is not published open access. Do I have to upload the link to the article?
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The most reliable link, for articles that have them,
is the DOI. It looks like this: https://doi.org/10.1177/0961000608099896 The DOI system is like a barcode that identifies the article in whatever format it is found. It usually takes you to the article citation on the publisher's website.
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I came across the Green Building and Sustainable Architecture collection under Nature Scientific Reports some weeks ago. https://www.nature.com/collections/gajghaebce
The special issue/collection is highly relevant to the manuscript I am planning to submit for consideration for publication with my co-authors. However, we do not have funding for Open Access publication.
Does anyone know if Nature Scientific Reports only publishes open access now i.e. publishing Open Access mandated by the journal now? Or there a way to publish non-open access? Or get a waiver?
After all the research is based on our industry data collected and insights gleaned from built projects over the years which we feel has valuable lessons learned for the wider industry and academia.
The authors in this manuscript are based in Singapore and the USA so we don't qualify under the Low Income Countries category article processing charge (APC) waiver either.
It feels unfair if industry authors who don't have access to university open access waivers want to publish their findings but don't have a chance to do so because of high APCs.
I have already written to journal but didn't hear back.
Any suggestions or insights will be useful. Thank you.
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Nature Scientific Reports does not specifically waive the open access fee for industry authors. Waivers and discounts for article processing charges (APCs) are primarily available for authors from low-income and lower-middle-income countries or those with financial need. These requests are considered on a case-by-case basis and must be made at the point of manuscript submission.
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Maybe parapsychology.
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Hello everyone, where can I publish my research in Ecology for free? My current research for publication is on phylogenetic analysis and niche differentiation of freshwater crabs.
I am also considering the impact factor of journals. Unfortunately, publishing open-access journals would cost 1000 USD minimum and I do not have funds for it. I prefer to publish my work as open-access to widen the readers.
Thanks so much!
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Hi Dianne. I am lookin the same. I found journals with high Impact Factor, So, with major requirements e.g. Perspectives in Ecology and Conservation, Heredity, etc. In this link you can find more, https://doaj.org/
Slds!
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I Think Self publication can be a good option for you.
read the following article for further motivation :)
Should You Self-Publish Your Research?
In 1901, Beatrix Potter’s “The Tales of Peter Rabbit” was rejected by several publishers, so she self-published the book. Less than a year later, publisher Frederick Warne & Co., one of the original group of publishers who rejected her manuscript, became Beatrix Potter’s publisher. The relationship lasted for 40 years and led to the publication of over 23 books. Over a century later, over two million books, which have been authored by Beatrix Potter, are sold each year!
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Sign the Diamond Initiative for Publishing Open Access Are you upset/frustrated about the unsustainable profiteering of commercial publishers which put papers behind a paywalls and/or require authors to pay the journal to make their paper open access (i.e., "Gold" OA)? Do you want to make a difference and help us change this system, towards a more community led publishing system? The collective action in science committee at freeourknowledge.org is launching a petition to encourage researchers to publish at least one scholarly paper with a non profit / diamond open access agreement within a five-year period. Diamond Open Access refers to a publishing model in which authors are not charged for making their work publicly available to all readers. We hereby invite you to contribute to this initiative by signing the pledge here. By signing the pledge, you will contribute to an increased demand for alternative community-led and university-led publishers. The pledge's activation is contingent on a threshold of 500 people which will demonstrate that researchers can reach a critical mass to change the status quo.
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There is also this initiative on right retention strategy : https://www.coalition-s.org/resources/rights-retention-strategy/
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Hello, I am 4th year medical student from Mexico and I lead a research group conformed mainly of other medical students with senior researchers as advisors. We are currently conducting 2 systematic reviews. Specifically, we are in the protocol writing stage. We would like to, apart from registering in PROSPERO, publish the protocol in Systematic Reviews (ISSN: 2046-4053) or any other journal that accept protocols for publications. How can we get funds for APC? Is it common for medical students to get funding from their universities to publish Open Access?
Any Journal recommendations for publishing the protocols, preferably if no open access fee is mandatory would be great.
Thank you in advance!!
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I believe there are very few journals that will publish open access without charging a fee; it is necessary to cover the costs of publishing as the journal does not receive fees from subscribers such as universities. However, there are a few options.
1. Check if your university has any 'read and publish' agreements with publishers, they enable one to publish open access free in any journal under that publisher.
2. Newly created open access journals often waive the APC fee, look at MDPI and Elsevier journals first, though other publishers do this as well.
3. Apply for funding for organisations with an interest in your review topic.
4. Settle for 'green open access'. All the major publishers (excluding MDPI and Frontiers) offer 'green open access' for free. This lets you share the 'accepted manuscript' on your institution's website and sometimes also on AXVIR. The 'pre-print' is not copyrighted and can be shared anywhere you like. Elsevier and SAGE have generous polices on this. The accepted manuscript and pre-print will be index by Google Scholar and linked to your research/ citation within a few weeks.
As a side, I think you should be more concerned about getting the actual systematic review publisher open access (same steps as above apply). Few people will be interested in your protocol, unless you are doing some massive ground-breaking review.
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I would like to know whether there are some scientific journals in Linguistics that publish open access without fees (APC) on authors and/or institution. Some renowned journals in the field ask around 3000 USD for a full open access publication, I think it is a bit expensive..
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@Andrea Briglia. You can use the Directory of Open Access Journals. Click on the filter for "Journals without APCs" and on the left-hand side you will be able to limit by subject Linguistics is under the broader category Language and Literature.
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In my observations, I have come across a practice where some researchers include foreign authors, particularly from underdeveloped countries, as the last author in their papers. This is done in order to obtain waivers or discounts in Hindawi journals. I am curious to understand the strategies researchers employ to overcome financial constraints in open-access publishing.
However, I have concerns about the ethical implications of this practice. I would like to explore whether this approach could be considered unethical within the research community.
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Yes, this does raise serious ethical issues but obtaining evidence of fraudulent practice would be difficult
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Open Journal of Clinical and Medical Case Reports (ISSN 2379-1039)
Not indexed on PubMed but NLM/PubMed ID: 101658769 (citations only)
It claims Impact Factor: 2.1
Thanks in advance
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This journal “Open Journal of Clinical and Medical Case Reports” seems to be a so-called stand-alone journal which is mentioned in the Beall’s list (https://beallslist.net/standalone-journals/ ). This a red flag that this might be a predatory journal. This is an indication but there are more red flags that this journal is most likely predatory:
-Contact info looks questionable (does not seem to resemble a ‘real’ office)
-Impact factor claim is misleading. They are not indexed in Clarivate’s SCIE index (which can be checked here https://mjl.clarivate.com/home ) and therefor they have by definition no impact factor.
-In addition to the fake impact factor info they mention in their indexing info DRJI, a so-called misleading metric (https://www.jclinmedcasereports.com/indexing.html ) often used by predatory journals
-They use in their open access info (https://www.jclinmedcasereports.com/open-access.html ) large parts of the text from the following website (https://www.springernature.com/gp/open-research/about/the-fundamentals-of-open-access-and-open-research ) without proper reference. Compare:
“Open Access is the free of charge, instant, online availability of research articles, together with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital milieu.” With the original “Open access (OA) refers to the free, immediate, online availability of research outputs such as journal articles or books, combined with the rights to use these outputs fully in the digital environment”
So, I would say this is a journal to avoid.
Best regards.
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Here's the case , For papers accepted for publication in (JES or JSS, )authors choose whether to publish their articles as open access.(ie via standard subscription mode)
All articles accepted for publication in (ECS Advances or ECS Sensors Plus) are published open access. My question is " Should I pay for journal subscription for jes Or jss for opting golden access.. Or without journal basic subscription can i publish my paper in jss Or jes..
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The journals you mentioned are so-called hybrid journals. You can opt. for open access but when you decline this then you can publish for free. This is true for “Journal of Systems and Software” https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-systems-and-software when you click on “Guide for authors” and then click on “Open access option” for more details. It is true for “Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES)” as well. If you click here https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/1945-7111 on “About the journal” you find more details.
The thing is that some journals like the two you mention still hang on to the subscription-based model where authors can publish for free, and readers normally can only read those papers when they have a subscription or the organization, they work for has a license. The hybrid model means that you can choose for open access and make your paper accessible for everybody and this requires a (hefty) fee (1785 USD for JES and 3350 USD for JSS).
As you already indicated journals like ECS advances and ECS Sensors Plus are exclusively open access, and these journals ask an APC for their financing (in both cases 1350 USD).
So, to answer your question you can publish for free (but behind a pay-wall for readers) when you decline the open access option. If you want to go for the open access option you have to pay an APC but you don't have to pay a subscription fee. If you choose for open access you should check the waiver options ignorer to see if you can get a discount somewhere.
Best regards.
PS. I saw that you published one paper in a ECS journal. As far as I can see this is a subscription-based journal and officially you are not allowed to make that paper publicly available. IOP has (for their subscription-based journals) a so-called green open access policy, see for more info here https://publishingsupport.iopscience.iop.org/questions/what-is-iop-publishings-green-open-access-policy/
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Open access journals often attract high publication cost as opposed to the subscription-access journals. What are the benefits of open access publishing? Thanks.
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There are many merits to publishing in open access (OA) journals, despite the potential for high publication costs. Here are some of the merits:
✓ Greater visibility and accessibility of research: OA articles are freely available online to anyone with an internet connection, making research more widely accessible to a global audience.
✓ Increased citation rates: OA articles have been shown to have higher citation rates than articles published in subscription journals, which can increase the impact and visibility of the research.
✓ Compliance with funder and institutional policies: Many funding agencies and institutions require that research be published in OA formats, making it easier to meet these requirements.
✓ Preservation of research: Many OA journals use digital preservation methods to ensure the longevity of research and its accessibility for future generations.
✓ More rapid dissemination: OA articles can be published faster than articles published in subscription journals, which means research can have a quicker impact in the field.
✓ No paywalls or article download fees: Readers are not required to pay to access articles published in OA journals, which can increase the reach and impact of the research.
✓ Greater control over copyrights: OA publishing often allows authors to retain copyright over their work, providing greater control over how the work is used and disseminated.
Regards,
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Although the preprints submissions can be interesting to check the repercussions, criticisms and suggestions pointed out, I think that a not very good choice of platform can have limited results. Among the platforms researched, I observed that OSF, Scielo and Elsevier preprints offer a reasonable structure for preprints submissions and analysis. In this sense, I kindly ask for suggestions on which platform may be the most indicated for a preprint submission in the field of social sciences.
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https://psyarxiv.com/ is common for psych, but if your goal is to get a lot of readers, with any of these it will be helped by posting links on social media. As since we are on ResearchGate, you can post here too.
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Over my career, I have published many invited reviews that have been refereed, often as part of major conference proceedings. These articles often end up as chapters in books. In some circumstances, these books are an annual production but in most cases they disappear into the ether, rarely cited (and thus, I presume, read) and perhaps never to be seen again except on eBay. Certainly, in the modern era of electronic access, they do not work. Often, the editing and production takes over 12 months by which time, much of the discussion can be out of date. One such case pains me in particular: a 1992 review into which my postdocs and I put a lot of energy and imagination, and risked a lot of our novel ideas. We were given the impression that this would article would be published in a special ediition of a regular journal. It ended up in a relatively obscure book. As a consequence, now I put little effort into such writings and I warn my team mates to be wary of releasing their ideas. Sad. But in these days of measurement by citation and extreme competition for research funds, I am wondering if science books are dead.
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I have a question please regarding of a book chaptre, Is this book chapter indexed in google scholar .
Yours, Sincerely,
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Hi. I am conducting research on the topic "Promoting Open Access in Higher Institutions of Learning. Challenges and Prospects". All necessary Ideas are welcome. Thanks!
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Controlled funding!
Confused by open-access policies? These tools can help
Emerging software helps funding agencies and scientists to ensure that research follows the rules...
OA.Report helps funders to track down research that they supported in the published literature and records article-processing charges; DataSeer checks on data and code availability; and Academic Tracker ensures that papers appear in an OA archive...
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I have an accepted peer-reviewed chapter contribution by an Open Access publisher. I cannot afford even the subsidised charge. Any way out?
Thanks
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Do your best and use your own money to make the sacrifice. You won't regret it later :)
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Dear Researchers,
Could you assist to find out which Journal Q1 in pharmaceutical sciences is free open access publishing
Thank you in advance
Kind regards
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Thank you very much for your assistant
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I'm helping set up a new journal, and I'm trying to avoid building Word/LaTeX templates from scratch. There are a ton of templates out there for existing journals, of course! I would love to simply reuse any of them, perhaps tweaking them slightly for our own journal. But I haven't found a template that explicitly allows for modification and reuse. Does anyone have any suggestion where to look or if you have one you are willing to share?
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Try the overleaf collection.
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With the advances in community review and Web3 on the horizon, I've been starting to wonder if the way in which traditional peer-review works is outdated. Have y'all found any systems out there that feel like the future of peer-review?
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That is the matter of reality. We have to face it. In recent years the number of retractions in journals, even top journals has increased.
Even when an article had been retracted many years ago, other authors were or are still citing them as a part of their literature review. For example lets have a look at this paper:
  • "Regression of human metastatic renal cell carcinoma after vaccination with tumor cell–dendritic cell hybrids" published in: Nature Medicine volume 6, pages332–336 (2000).
But in this URL we find the retraction note
Retraction date is sept 2003.
But a Google Scholar search shows, it has been cited 59 times, by different researchers, from 2018 up to now. Now let's ask ourselves where were/are peer reviewers? (in such a case)
After start of Covid 19 a "Paper Rush" began, every one wanted to be the first or among the first ones to have it in his field of teaching, expertise. So now there are a huge number of retracted papers just on Covid 19.
The problem so tense, some researchers addressed it in this article with a term "PAPERDEMIC" to attract concerns
  • "COVID-19 research: pandemic versus “paperdemic”, integrity, values and risks of the “speed science”" DOI 10.1080/20961790.2020.1767754
and then among too many other articles about the problems with peer review, these two articles by the New York Times:
  • "Two Huge Covid-19 Studies Are Retracted After Scientists Sound Alarms"
and this one
"The Pandemic Claims New Victims: Prestigious Medical Journals: Two major study retractions in one month have left researchers wondering if the peer review process is broken"
  • When we follow the cases of retractions in different journals, the role of whistleblowers is great. Now they have become gatekeepers of science . So it is a kind of "Post peer review" that is of great help. I firmly believe peer review in scientific research is gatekeeper of our health, life, nature, future and other good things, but we need new methods, as far as I have been thinking about and testing, post peer review could be a valuable option. Let me quote a sentence from the above mentioned article. "The truth is that the “scientific research has changed the world” but now, and more than ever, “it needs to change itself” (Ricardo Jorge Dinis-Oliveira, 2020) DOI: 10.1080/20961790.2020.1767754
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Research chemists continue in their slow uptake of preprints. I've lately suggested one key reason for this unique behaviour of scholars in the basic sciences in two OA studies, one published by Publications:
and another by Insights:
What is your opinion on the origin of this delay? Has your team recently embraced preprint publishing? What are your favorite preprint repositories?
Thank you in advance for your insight.
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Dear Prof. Mario Pagliaro, Preprints are defined as an author’s version of a research manuscript prior to formal peer review at a journal, which is deposited on a public server. ResearchGate (RG) said about "Preprints": early-stage research. On the other side, RG is not a publisher and, in turn, uploaded unpublished text is not regarded as a publication. Hence, a preprint is an author's own original or draft version of their paper before any peer review has taken place and before it is published.
Before answering this valuable question, please let me give my own opinion about the preprint dilemma (مُعضلة ما قبل الطباعة):
I have a different perspective on uploading any preprint anywhere before it has been published. Why do you let others know about your insights and methodologies before publication? You should avoid telling the other researchers about the details of any one of your papers until it has been published and seeing your name by yourself. You may say that I am somewhat old-fashioned, but I have a different perspective on uploading any preprint anywhere before it has been published by your name. My advice is not to put your research anywhere until it is published. It is a security issue:
  • Your manuscript may be copied and then published by others before you can do that. This stealing of your paper might be happening. So, you must wait until the paper is accepted and then published in that journal. Then, upload that research item on any platform you wish.
  • A journal may have automated plagiarism software to check the paper before admitting it to the reviewing process. There are chances that your paper can get a rejection at any point. Thus, to avoid this problem. Publish the preprint after you got the paper as "ACCEPTED".
  • There may be a "cold war" between the professors of a given department. They do not like to discuss ideas as others will "steal" them and publish an article on them without giving credit to the one from whom they got the idea. My suggestion is to keep your work "private" and share it only with those who are really interested.
  • Academic publishing remains a competitive process. If someone else has recently published a paper very similar to mine, mine is less likely to be accepted. So although I may share my topic, I prefer to keep my methodology, findings, and discussion private, until published in a peer-reviewed journal. So. there is a high chance that someone may claim your idea as theirs!
  • Preprint gives a false feeling of security. Personally, I would always wait until the paper is accepted by the editor of a journal. After that, I can post it as a regular research item on any platform you wish.
Finally, for the coming future, do not upload any paper anywhere until it is published with your name. Even if it is a "preprint"! For the time being, If you had done something like that as a "preprint", for instance, I advise you to delete the preprint from any elsewhere and wait for two months before sending the paper to any journal.
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Dear community,
let me preface by saying my field is functional morphology (of the dentition), in both biological and paleontological contexts. Through my current position in a multidisciplinary institute, and on a highly diverse campus, I have made many friends from different disciplines. Amongst them a lot of physicists, and naturally we talk about work and the subject of publishing papers of course comes up, too.
I noted a striking difference: they often say "we just published this paper" and mean, they have just uploaded on arXiv.org. Moreover, first uploading to pre-print archives, and seeking publication much later, is totally accepted, it even seems encouraged and just the norm.
I feel in my field, we are still thinking of pre-prints as being "no real publications", and will seek peer-reviewed publication first - only uploading to pre-print servers if the journal permits to upload the submitted version.
My question is, what is he perception in your field? Are we robbing ourselves of opportunities by not engaging with pre-print archives more? Should this change?And where do these different publication practices in the different sciences come from?
I am interested in your insight.
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One of my friends was accused of plagiarism; do you know why?
After about three months, his research paper was rejected because of plagiarism. When he checked the journal report, he found that his paper was accused of plagiarism with a 61% percentage. The reason is that his manuscript was previously uploaded as a preprint. It took him another two months to solve the problem and remove the manuscript from the database of the preprint.
So, in order to solve this type of issue, it may take several months of following up to remove the manuscript from the database of the preprint. Anyhow, If there were accusations of plagiarism, it is not well for any researcher's reputation, in any meaning.
Needless to say that if you are using your own words, there should be no plagiarism issue.
Another important related issue, be careful if you have other co-authors with you. For this reason, I only trust just my own words.
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I recently discovered that many open access advocates are publishing their work on open access in paid journals. Is it justified or fair enough that a researcher working on open access and advocating its immediate application across the globe is publishing their own open access research in pay-walled journals? What is your opinion in this regard?
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Fayaz Ahmad Loan You're welcome. Also I agree with you, that there might be other reasons, maybe hidden or unseen. Lets talk about UNSEEN. Some times when we talk with those who have firm beliefs in lets say a given method, Idea, person, findings … They think that "given" is ultimate. For example because that researcher is well-known.
It was in 1968 that late professor ROBERT K. MERTON, the founder of "SOCIOLOGY of SCIENCE" (Not to be confused with SOCIOLOGY SCIENCE)
published a very important article in Science Journal, it is, "The Matthew Effect in Science: The reward and communication systems of science are considered"
DOI: 10.1126/science.159.3810.56
The article is a classic one and relevant today. The meaning of The Matthew Effect in science(s) could be compared to "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer" in our ordinary life.
Anyway the findings of the article is on psychosocial processes. Merton says: "The Matthew effect may serve to heighten the visibility of contributions to science by scientists of acknowledged standing and to reduce the visibility of contributions by authors who are less well known".
So I think now we can add to Matthew Effect other factors, variables methods... Some may think or want to stick to one Idea, method, … in science (s) because that has many advocates (in your own words about OA) that would become a kind of Matthew Effect, move up and up in sciences, because others and again others come to accept it, use it, and later may suggest or even recommend it. Therefore while some researchers "may" believe in open access, others may accept it and advertise it on psychosocial processes, in Professor Merton's terms. (here I mean it is unseen)
The phenomena of Matthew Effect in all the world of academia, now could be extended, and we need to talk more and more about them to see what we can do to throw light on the dark side of sciences. That is why, I started my own discussions (late 2021) and take part in relevant discussions, (like yours). Like many others I think we need a change, and it should go beyond a discussion of several to hundreds of participants.
Meanwhile some good discussions are going on, that I encourage you and others to join for example this one, that I am preparing a long and e challenging (hope so) answer to be added to it, in coming days.
also this one
  • in this one you have links to other relevant discussions
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Recently all Peer-Reviewed (SCI) Journals are consistently supporting open access publishing practices. My concern is that, it will not be very arduous for researchers from poor country to publish articles in such journals?. Most of researchers from different countries who cannot afford that much money due to lack of research grants including funds crisis etc.. Is this really a good move in scientific academia?. It is like benefiting the same rich sections and it seem like scientific business rather than good freely quilty research? Now the house is open for enlightened thought in this regard.
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Your worries are valid and I am with you on this one. However, I believe that researchers from poor countries can choose to partner with foreign institutions to get their papers funded. Like any other industry, it is always the fittest that gets served. Football, for instance, does not consider that some poor countries might not have the resources toward the best coaches and players. It has become an it-is-what-it-is world.
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Dear researchers. If we want to publish a paper in a hybrid-type journal and choose the non-open access option (for subscribers only), is it literally free, or is there still a possibility of paying a less charge than APC in their open access option? How can we identify it?
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I have never been charged anything from hybrid journals (because I was always publishing as "subscription") so I would agree with your original idea that is literally free. If it is not clear from the journal's website, I would clarify with the journal or publisher's office. Lucky, also, I have never needed English-editing so have never had those charges as mentioned by Lowilius Wiyono - I wonder who does that (?) - do those people have adequate training/background in the subject matter?
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One of my research papers was rejected without being sent for peer review but I have just found a highly similar paper published by the same journal. Now can I request for an explanation from the journal for this double standard policy?
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Dear 情熱的 研究者
Say hello for another journal.
Good luck
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I recently got an invitation as a potential reviewer from "info@peer-review.net", In the email (see below), there was no mention of the group to which the journal belonged and the email has not been mentioned on the website of the journal.
Have you had any encounters with The Open Civil Engineering Journal yet? What do you think of them? Or do you think it is a fake email?
Thank you very much to you all for your valuable contributions which will benefit us all.
Here is the email in question:
March 3, 2022
Dr. AB Alsamawi
Univ Tlemcen
Fac Technol
Dept Civil Engn
EOLE Res Lab, BP 230, Tilimsen
ALGERIA
Dear Dr. Alsamawi,
In view of your work in the field, your name has been recommended, as a potential reviewer, for the manuscript entitled “...........” that has been submitted for publication in the journal “The Open Civil Engineering Journal”. Please review the abstract below, to see if it comes in your direct field of expertise, and provide us a confirmation of your willingness to review the complete manuscript. I hope that you will be able to help us.
Title: .......
Abstract: Aims: ........... Background: .......... Objective: ........ Results: ............
I would appreciate it if you could kindly respond to this message at your earliest. Since we are endeavoring to provide an efficient review process for our authors, we would request that you send your comments and recommendations, if any, back to us as soon as possible.
In addition to carrying out this review, we would also like to propose your name, as a reviewer, to be included in the Reviewer Panel of this journals, and possibly others relevant to your field. Our Reviewer Portal will also offer its reviewers the following benefits and discounts on other Bentham services:
•         A free eBook of their Choice, on completion of two reviews
•         A 50% Fee Waiver on Quick Track rates on completion of 3 reviews
•         A 40% discount on Open Access Plus rates on completion of 4 reviews
As a member of our Reviewer panel, you would be expected to review a maximum of 3 articles every year. Please also note that to expedite the review, this request has been sent to several qualified researchers and once we get the first three commitments to review, we will not entertain any further acceptances.
Thank you for your consideration.
Regards,
Ayesha Chaudary
Editorial Manager
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The journal is part of Bentham Open, a publisher fully dedicated to open access publishing. There are a number of discussions here on RG about this issue:
My conclusion: It is fake.
According to their own website they state: “The full manuscript has to be submitted online via Bentham's Manuscript Processing System (MPS) at (https://bentham.manuscriptpoint.com/). The link “Submit Manuscript Online” leads you directly to the submission system of that specific journal.”
You can ask confirmation here: info@benthamopen.net
Best regards.
PS. So far, I’ve seen the following suspicious addresses discussed on ResearchGate:
@editorial-peer-review.net
@specialissueeditors.net
@currentmedicinalchemistry.org
@currentsmartmaterials.net
@editorialboard-office.net
I asked the people behind this publisher to confirm my suspension that these mail addresses have nothing to do with Bentham Science? And that all official contacts always end with ...@benthamscience.net or …@benthamopen.net ?
Thanking you in advance.
I suspect that there is a third-party company active here that promises (for a fee of course) a successful application to an indexed journal (in this case a Bentham journal) and by this way they try to collect genuine peer review reports to make it all look more ‘real’.
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It is the link of a beneficial Q&A page with more than 320 answer by RG colleagues.
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It all depends on your field of study as some journals are specific to a given research domain.
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Journal of Industrial & Management Optimization (JIMO) is an open access journal. You pay a substantial amount to publish a paper. When you go to the website of its publisher, American Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS Press), it seems that it is not really based in the United States. I am not sure if it is a legitimate professional organization or if it is a predatory publisher. They have a large number of open access journals. On the other hand, their handling of papers is terrible: extremely slow and low-tech, which is not typical for predatory journals. It may take 13 months to get an editorial rejection, for instance. Furthermore, they don't have an online submission system with user profiles on it, you just submit the paper on a website, and they give you a URL to check your paper's status, which makes your submission open to anyone who has the URL. It has an impact factor of 1.3, which makes me puzzled. Any comments on this organization and the journal will be appreciated.
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Norbert Tihanyi one little warning, if you look whether a particular journal is mentioned in the Beall’s list you should not only check the journal title in the stand-alone journal list (https://beallslist.net/standalone-journals/) but also the publisher behind it (if any). In this case the publisher is not mentioned in the Beall’s list (https://beallslist.net/). Anis Hamza I suppose you mean ISSN number, this journal with ISSN 1547-5816 and/or E-ISSN:1553-166X is mentioned in Scopus (https://www.scopus.com/sources.uri?zone=TopNavBar&origin=searchbasic) and Clarivate’s Master journal list (https://mjl.clarivate.com/home).
Back to your question, it is somewhat diffuse. There are signs that you are dealing with a questionable organization:
-Contact info renders in Google a nice residence but does not seem to correspond to an office and I quote “The American Institute of Mathematical Sciences is an international organization for the advancement and dissemination of mathematical and applied sciences.” https://www.aimsciences.org/common_news/column/aboutaims
-Both websites https://www.aimsciences.org/and http://www.aimspress.com/ function more or less okay but not flawless
-The journal “Journal of Industrial & Management Optimization (JIMO)“ is somewhat vague about the APC. It positions itself as hybrid (with an APC of 1800 USD), but all papers I checked can be read as open access (although not all have a CC etc. license). It mentions something like open access for free when an agreement is signed with your institution but how much this cost is unclear
-No problem by itself but the majority of authors are from China, makes you wonder about American Institute…
-Editing is well…sober
On the other hand it looks like and I quote “AIMS is a science organization with two independent operations: AIMS Press (www.aimspress.com) and the American Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) (www.aimsciences.org ).” AIMS Press is focused on Open Access journals while the journals published by AIMS (www.aimsciences.org) are/used to be subscription-based journals. Pretty much like Springer has there BioMed Central (BMC) journal portfolio and Bentham has their Bentham Open division.
Facts are:
-AIMS ( www.aimsciences.org ), more than 20 of their journals are indexed in SCIE and indexed in Scopus as well (under the publisher’s name: American Institute of Mathematical Sciences)
-AIMS Press (www.aimspress.com ), four journals are indexed in SCIE and thus have an impact factor and 14 journals are indexed in Clarivate’s ESCI. 7 journals are indexed in Scopus.
-AIMS Press, 20 of their journals are a member of DOAJ
-Journal of Industrial & Management Optimization (JIMO) https://www.aimsciences.org/journal/1547-5816 is indexed in Clarivate’s SCIE (impact factor 1.801, see enclosed file for latest JCR Report) and Scopus indexed CiteScore 1.8 https://www.scopus.com/sourceid/12900154727.
-For the papers I checked the time between received and accepted varies between 6 and 9 months and an additional 3-4 months before publication (it is well… not fast but not unusual)
So, overall, I think that the publisher has quite some credibility and it might be worthwhile to consider.
Best regards.
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A journal has accepted my paper which has multiple indexing including google scholar and is open access. But it ain't scopus indexed. Does that make the journal less desirable or credible?
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Google scholar is (just) a search engine dedicated to scholarly/academic article, however, it is not an indexing criteria/authority. It can index any journal type regardless if the articles are peer-reviewed or quality of article or journal as a whole.
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The problem is that I can not recognize what is predatory publisher and what is not. Why? Because some superiors (often professors or groups with certain interests) claim that this or that publisher is bad, with predatory traits.
This negative campaign is being run against publishers whose journals are indexed in the Web of Science or Scopus databases.
Do you think it's perfectly okay to publish in journals indexed in WoS / Scopus? Or can these databases index stacks of predatory publishing journals?
Of course, there can be some mistakes in the order of units..
Please help share this including your opinions, thanks.
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Generally speaking, the two big databases of WoS and Scopus are a measurement of what it is called reputable journals. However, a famous publisher like Elsevier published 6 fake journals in the past. Therefore, we need to be quite aware of what is going on. To conclude, you can depend on the two databases, but also check the journals themselves and see which agency or institution publishes them.
All the best.
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Have you read the paper of "Bohannon J. Who’s Afraid of Peer Review? Science, 2013, 342: 60-65"? The results are surprising that over 50% of the 304 OA journals accepted a Deliberately-fabricated article. Is it true that all those 157 open access journals do not conduct peer review, and have very poor scholarly quality?
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Non
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In order to achieve more views and downloads for my open access papers, is posting them in SSRN can be a good idea?
Is SSRN a similar website like Research Gate?
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SSRN (Social Science Research Network) is a platform that serves as a repository for preprints, working papers in social sciences and humanities. It is currently owned by Elsevier (and in fact Elsevier journals propose to upload submitted papers as pre-prints in SSRN). While pre-prints on SSRN can receive some visibility, please consider that they are not peer-reviewed (and thus barely cited). For most academic journals, posting preprints on SSRN is not considered prior publication, but some journals require to delete pre-prints after acceeptance.
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I'm interested in repositories like zenodo, figshare, etc., where open-access papers (previously published) can be uploaded in order to improve the visibility of papers. Thanks a lot for your suggestions!
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University under which you study should be having a repository. Most of them have it already. But they do include mostly unpublished thesis. Check yourself before adding.
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Does anyone have experience with Columbus Publishers?
trustworthy or predatory journals?
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This publisher is new (and certainly too new to be mentioned in for example the Beall’s list (if they turn out to be predatory). I do see some red flags:
-Location is suspect, Google the address and you end up with some pretty nice-looking real estate but a highly unlikely location for an office
-I noticed in literally the first paper that this publisher is not sharp in copyright permissions of images, this is a red flag for the lack of proper peer review and use of well-established scientific standards
-The photo used on their homepage is probably not original since it is already used here https://professionals.hartstichting.nl/samenwerking-en-financiering/samenwerking/talentontwikkeling
-They are new so consequently non-established but still they a membership with ridiculous prices https://www.columbuspublishers.com/membership
-The APC’s are way too high for a basically non-indexed journal https://www.columbuspublishers.com/journal/research-journal-of-gastroenterology-and-hepatology?submenu=article-process-feefor a research/review article they charge 1499 USD
-The journals I checked are empty (no papers and no board members…)
Even if this might turn out to be a genuine and legit initiative I would go for another journal. Looking at your publication list you found way better one’s than this new player.
Best regards.
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The Publishing Industry is a robber of knowledge democracy, especially for us who live in the Global South. The Publishing Industry, of late, has been asking for a mandatory so-called Article Processing Fee (APC). In my opinion, this is pure theft. These publishers are increasing limiting options to choose from when submitting a manuscript. They will not, for example, give you a choice to NOT PAY A FEE, or ASK FOR A WAIVER. The only option you are given is: I AM WILLING TO PAY THE APC upon acceptance of my paper. This is daylight robbery.
For knowledge democracy and decolonization of knowledge, works from the Global South should be published open access and with APCs waived. It is encouraging to see that MDPI and Hindawi are learning that and doing it very quickly. The "Western" Publishing Industry should copy what MDPI and Hindawi are doing and set researchers in the Global South free.
You are welcome to continue this discussion.
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It seems to me that the main problem is that publishing scientific papers and books is mainly a commercial market. A large part of science is funded by governmental money, but with some exceptions to publication of the results is by privat enterprises. However, a commercial market cannot be ruled by democratic principles. - There have been many discussions before on the problem of APC, see, e.g.:
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I have just published a book with a big international science publisher (CRC Press, a branch of Taylor and Francis). The multi-author edited book is nice and hopefully useful for many (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321016401_Grasslands_of_the_world_diversity_management_and_conservation), but the experiences with the publisher were so disappointing that some co-authors and I decided to start a public discussion on writing scientific books in the age of greedy publishers.
Here are some key facts of our collaboration with CRC/Francis and Taylor:
· The communication with the publisher was very unreliable and inefficient: e.g. did we receive various requests multiple times and the publisher “forgot” about previous written agreements.
· The typesetting as the only service provided by the publisher was very poor: about 90% of the changes made by the publisher introduced errors into previously correct text or tables and it was very time-consuming for us to find all these errors and remove them again.
· Instead of paying the authors a honorarium for their work, the publisher forced us to pay for the colour figures in our articles.
· The publisher refused to give the authors a complimentary print copy of their book (only the editors got one).
· First the publisher wanted to provide an electronic version of the chapter/book only to each corresponding author, not to all authors, and only after serious negotiations they accepted to provide e-books to all authors. We assumed that these would be functional pdf’s, but instead they received the books in a very weird e-book format with a display in an ugly and hardly readable layout (e.g. all text in bold), not allowing proper printing nor sharing parts of the content (e.g. single pages or figures) with others. This means that the authors did not receive any printed or electronic copy of that exactly corresponds to the published version of their own work.
I am extremely frustrated about the behaviour of CRC/Francis and Taylor and consider the last point as being at the edge of unethical. My feeling is that CRC might only reflect the strategy of most international science publishers to maximise profit by pressing money out of both authors and readers/libraries, while at the same time minimising the service they provide. On the other hand my gut feeling tells me that nowadays with cheap print-on-demand technology and the possibility to distribute printed or open access e-books without the need to involve a big marketing/distribution machinery should allow for other solutions.
Therefore, I would like to ask you two questions:
· Did you make similar experiences with other science publishers, or are they better or even worse?
· Do you see ways how those among us who would like to continue to write nice and useful books can do this without sacrificing themselves to profit-maximisation strategy of the big international science publishers?
Looking forward to your responses and hoping for a lively debate,
Prof. Dr. Jürgen Dengler
(ZHAW, Wädenswil, Switzerland)
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I had a positive experience with Springer. I was involved in two book chapters; the publisher sent me a hard copy of the book.
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I have enjoyed listening to podcasts to learn about scientific communication, research methodology, peer review, open access, preprints, scientometrics, and other topics. I am interested if anyone has a podcast they like that discusses any of these topics. Here are some that I have listened to so far:
The Scholarly Kitchen Podcast
InformED (ISMPP)
Everything Hertz
Science Communication Journal Club Podcast
Thank you,
Rob
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Author expresses polite request to recommend a journal in Comparative Literature which accepts:
i. submissions discussing semi-forgotten poets of Russian fin-de-siecle i.i.submissions discussing a single cycle in enitre ouvre of such figure,
ii. submissions from seemingly unremarkable graduate students
iii. submissions analyzing literature from aesthetical standpoint, with minimal relevance to burning social issues and their solutions, however defined.
[Prehistory: I'm a promising, and so far not much more, graduate student, who managed to not publish anything so far. I have no regrets though, both because world needs more reading and less writing, and simply for looking at my old drafts.]
I'm finishing an article about Nikolay Gumilyov (Николай Гумилёв, Gumilyev, Gumil'ev) - who, surprisingly for several Scopus-listed journals, is not the same person as his son, Lev Gumilyov, and whom I find shockingly understudied and underappreciated. Never particularly popular in the West, today, with interests shifting... well, away from Russian aristocratic aesthetes, he seems to be almost forgotten. Similarly in Central Europe, or at least in Poland, where I come from: before perestroika Gumilyov was "unpublishable" in Soviet Union, so it was difficult to get acquainted with his poetry when knowledge of Russian was fairly widespread, and today hardly anyone knows the language or has much interest in such topics (understandably, yet sadly). In Russia, on the other hand, he has his place in the canon secured, but it comes with a price of being incorporated into the lore of state ideology.
Fortunately, here I am with my article on his Italian Poems. While I think the article is very decent, it's not the most en vogue topic. On top of that, nolens volens, I end up arguing with almost every critic I refer to. And still, I need to publish it to face my supervisor with my head high, and also because turning this great poet into a misspelled footnote to Akhmatova and Mandelsham, or a banner woven from misinterpretations, is un-for-giv-a-ble.
Which leads to my point, as I can no longer ignore the burning question where I'm planning to submit my untimely meditations, composed in English. To make things worse, while I do offer some original input, there is no grand synthesis, the thing is quite specific. Too specific for a generalist journal, I guess, but I could try something on Modernism, or Decadence, or correspondence of arts, or Italy/Italianism. I will be grateful for any suggestions, or at least warnings!
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Obviously, it would be good if our work would be open for access by anyone. Publishing open access, however, is expensive especially for most researchers in developing countries. Would you mind sharing insights on how you promote your work?
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Create your own accounts in a trusted academic platform(s).
Add your publication and taking into account publishing copyrights.
Present your comments and feedback.
Regards,
Emad
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How much does the quality of articles vary when the Open Access publishing model is used?
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Hi Dr Ziyauddin Seikh . I think there is no relationship between open access journals and quality of articles.
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I would like to ask you to share your experience for publishing in MDPI special issues:
1- It seems they are getting benefit from Invited Guest Editors to write and present a short proposal about a specific topic. This is purely an honorary position and after this step, the staff of MDPI (who are not from the academy) will proceed with everything. They receive manuscripts from authors and send the manuscript for revision. In many cases, if the article is accepted with a major revision, only 5 days will be given by the assistant editor to revise the manuscript!!!
2- High publishing cost (almost 2000 CHF) is another negative point.
3- It seems 100 CHF gift for reviewers is attractive enough for many people who voluntarily work as a reviewer without having enough experience in that topic. The reviewers only ask for modifying graphs and tables and suggesting their article as a reference!!!
4- I personally prefer to submit to a journal with a professional academic editor who is really familiar with the topic and after acceptance to pay for open access.
5- The impact factor of special issues is high, but i think this is neither related to the quality of the articles nor the journal. This is mainly due to the open acces of journals that articles can receive more citations!
6- The positive point from my side is that they are quite fast and within one month you will receive the result, either accepted or rejected!
They know how to play the game and get advantages from the name and position of guest editors by offering discounts!
My main point is if you have high-quality work submit it to a high-quality journal and if you are interested to make your work more visible, just pay for open access.
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Whilst the mainstream here is appealing against publishing in MDPI. I would like to raise another reason for people to publishing there, which is "TIME".
Traditional journals nowadays take really long time to review, while MDPI can guarantee the speed. Many reviewers of traditional journals agree to review but do not deliver ON TIME. Using myself as an example, I know that the journals I chose give 30 days for reviewers but my experience shows that it is quite usual for reviewers to just put the manuscript aside and return after 3-4 months. This is just one round - usually the overall process results in that a paper being delayed in publishing for around one year.
One year delay can be very bad regarding research outputs, as a large project is normally 2-3 years, PhD in the UK is 3-4 years - we really want our research to be seen before we submit the final report...Thinking about the potential delay, it would be sometimes risky to submit a manuscript to traditional journals, thus people logically choose MDPI which normally can publish in one month.
Therefore, alongside this forum, I would say we could also create a thread to suggest the reviewers, who kindly agreed to contribute, can also be as ON TIME as possible...
Note - I am not a fan or opponent of MDPI - just saying my opinion.
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This discussion is precipitated by a discussion in a list serve that I am subscribed to concerning predatory publishing and the issue of working with and publishing in MDPI journals.
In my experience, when the subject of MDPI journals is put forward, this tends to raise polarizing discourses and opinions.
My question: What has been your experience in dealing with MDPI journals either as guest editor, author or reviewer?
Recently, researchers in Poland published this study that goes some way to addressing this polemic.
See: Krawczyk, F., & Kulczycki, E. (2021). How is open access accused of being predatory? The impact of Beall's lists of predatory journals on academic publishing. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 47(2), 102271. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0099133320301622
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Actually, here is my last article.
This was posted in a special issue. And I am very happy about that. Everything went without delay.
Regards, Sergey
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Choosing a journal for the publication of research articles is becoming increasingly difficult and a source of concern. Most often, the researcher struggles to determine the article's weight and is rejected. So, how should we go about choosing a journal? Do you have any suggestions that you find useful? I'd be extremely grateful.
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Yes, that's right, choosing a journal for a research paper is not an easy matter. Journals with a high level of recognition in the scientific world and included in the Scopus and / or Web of Science lists usually require high fees for publishing an article. Journals that do not require fees, have simplified editorial procedures, are usually much less known, and articles published in these journals are less frequently cited. But there are journals that do not require a fee to publish an article, and the articles included in these journals are also posted on many different indexing databases of articles, journals and research papers when published. In this situation, the possibility of citation and recognition of the published article also increases. This is particularly important when the entire text of the published article is posted in the OA formula in various indexing databases of articles, journals and research papers and on various internet research portals.
Below I propose good scientific journals published every six months (semi-annuals), which, after publishing their articles, place all articles in many databases of indexing scientific publications in the open access formula. Articles for publication are accepted free of charge and are also published free of charge. You can publish for free in these magazines. Articles published in these journals are entered in many indexing databases of scientific journals. These magazines are published electronically in PDF and also in printed version.
Below are the websites of three scientific journals that meet these criteria:
- "International Journal of Innovation in Social Sciences and Engineering" (ISSN 2543-7089):
Social sciences, various humanities and exact sciences, also taking into account social, sociological, economic and other aspects:
- "International Journal of Legal Studies" (ISSN 2543-7097):
Legal sciences, normative aspects of various issues, various issues described in normative terms:
- "International Journal of Innovation in Social Sciences and Engineering" (ISSN 2543-7089):
Humanities and exact sciences, various fields of science, various types of issues including new technologies, various fields of innovation applications, determinants of innovation development, etc.
Have a nice day, Stay healthy! Best wishes,
Dariusz Prokopowicz
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I plan to post a research pre-print in arXiv.org of a paper that I already submitted for publication in a journal.
If the pre-print gets cited, I wonder if the citations can be attributed to its corresponding journal article once it gets published.
I hope those with experience on this can provide some insights below.
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Mª Angeles Zorrilla Lopez-Perea
Arxiv is not a journal, but the most popular collection of preprints in the world, in which articles are mostly pre-published before they are sent to journals. Arxiv has nothing to do with logs. Articles published in Arxiv are not indexed in world databases such as WoS, Scopus.
I'm sorry if I didn't answer what you asked
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Recently, some of the reputable open access journals have attracted great attention from researchers around the world. This raises many questions about the continued credibility and scientific impact of these journals in the next years.
Kind Regards
Dr. HLG
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A number of research publications have indicated that open access articles are viewed and cited more frequently than ones solely available to subscribers. Open access publications in hybrid journals receive more downloads, citations, and attention than those published behind a paywall.
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There are common terms pointing to unapproved publishing journals, like fake, predatory, phishing ... etc. Can someone help clarifying the differences between these terms?
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I believe, like Ramadan, that the term 'predatory' is the common 'umbrella' term that overarches the other terms also mentioned. Fake - I do not think is a good term to use. All journals are 'real' and the means that they use to try and attract manuscripts are real - it is just that their means, motives and intentions differ. Predatory journals are generally 'soliciting' for custom purely on the basis of monetary gain - and not for the overall 'good/quality' of the academic community through robust review processes.
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Given your experience, which repository would you recommend to share current research results with other researchers?
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The Beall's web site scholarly-oa.com does not host the Beall's list of predatory journals and publishers anymore.
I have recenly found a web site https://predatoryjournals.com/ which claims to build on it and expand this list (see https://predatoryjournals.com/about/ ).
What do you think of it?
Update [August 1, 2019]: The question was originally posted on December 26, 2017 but now it looks like the site in question remains dormant and was not updated since 2017, which makes the question somewhat moot.
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Dear Michael John McAleer , we have already discussed on some other thread about definition of predatory publishing.
Leading scholars and publishers from ten countries have agreed a definition of predatory publishing that can protect scholarship. It took 12 hours of discussion, 18 questions and 3 rounds to reach. Leading scholars and publishers from ten countries have agreed a definition of predatory publishing that can protect scholarship. It took 12 hours of discussion, 18 questions and 3 rounds to reach...
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Is MDPI a predatory journal publisher from China?
More info>
MDPI was included on Jeffrey Beall's list of predatory open access publishing companies in 2014.
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Judging journals, or, worse, papers, by their publisher does not strike me as fair on anyone. MDPI is a money-making machine, and the pressure is there to prioritise speed and income over quality. But some of their journals regularly publish excellent papers, and have conscientious editorial boards that work hard to maintain journal standards.
Judging an applicant based on the publisher of the journals in which they published is short-sighted and unfair. Surely, if you are considering hiring someone, you should take the time to evaluate their output individually and on its merits? After all, it wasn't MDPI that published Cold Fusion or a scientific name for the Loch Ness Monster...
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Most, if not all, publishers approach the acquisition of original work through the transfer of publication rights of the author to those of the publisher. Hence, the copyright is given to the publisher vs. the author. I propose that instead of lessening the value of published works through Open Access, publishers should offer authors the opportunity to benefit more from their own work. My interest is to create a publishing house who LEASES original works while guaranteeing copyright to the author. Of course, individual agreements would include a negotiated percentage of compensation above publishing costs, length of lease, marketing responsibilities, etc. When you answer, please tell me if you are new to publishing, have published in journals, or have published books. It would also be nice to know how many estimated items in journals and/or book publications. Thank you!
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Yes, your proposal of innovative publishing is really good. I recommend your model of publication for adoption by various publication agencies.
For your info, I am a researcher with more than 100 research papers published in various research journals. I also have published more than a dozen books to date.
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Both strategies: High Impact Factor or established journal - have different functions, other positive aspects and other limitations are not fully comparable.
Which strategies are considered to be more appropriate depends on the privities who the researcher writing the scientific papers deems more important. In the context of this issue an important question arises: Do you publish in scientific journals with a high Impact Factor but representing related or other fields of knowledge against the scientific specialty of the researcher who sends his scientific texts for publication?
Do you, however, publish in journals with a lower Impact Factor, which represent the field of knowledge in which the researcher specializes and writes his scientific texts? Which strategy is chosen by individual researchers, scientists and research and teaching staff of the university depends on whether the prime points are collected IF for the institution, which the researcher affirms, or more important is the citation of written texts in a given field, but more important is the issue of publishing in magazines whose titles are closely correlated with the problems of scientific texts written by the researcher.
Do you agree with me on the above matter?
In the context of the above issues, the following question is valid:
What are the key priorities for you when choosing a scientific journal for publishing scientific texts?
Please reply
I invite you to the discussion
Thank you very much
Best wishes
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At first, I check if it has a good indexing, and in my case, if it has a good index in the MIAR page. If I see that it has certain guarantees of quality, then I read the guidelines and instructions. What I don't like is that journals show as a great merit the high percentage of rejections. It is one thing to guarantee quality, it is another thing to reject as a way of understanding quality.
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I founded an open-access academic journal titled Journal of Emerging Computer Technologies (JECT) that will start publishing in 2021 and it has no processing, publishing, open-access or any other charges for authors. https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/ject
Would you like to contribute by sending an article to a newly established journal?
What are your thoughts on newly established journals?
Edit (18.09.2023): The journal provides DOI, indexed by "Index Copernicus, ROAD, Academia.edu, Google Scholar, Asos Index, Academic Resource Index (Researchbib), OpenAIRE, IAD, Cosmos, EuroPub, Academindex" and still fully free and open access. We invite you to send your paper about computer science related topics.
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does this journal provide a DOI for the papers?
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It starts with some background
The China/Asia On Demand (CAOD) site (https://caod.oriprobe.com/index.htm) uses the name “International Journal of Pharmaceutical Research” with ISSN 1674-0440. A real Chinese subscription-based journal https://caod.oriprobe.com/journals/gwyx-yxfc/INTERNATIONAL_JOURNAL_OF_PHARMACEUTICAL_RESEARCH.htm
However, the ISSN nr. 1674-0440 uses “Guoji yaoxue yanjiu zazhi” https://portal.issn.org/resource/ISSN/1674-0440 and is linked to the same Chinese subscription-based journal but now uses the name “Journal of International Pharmaceutical Research” (http://202.38.153.236:81/Jweb_jipr/EN/article/showOldVolumn.do does not seem to work well but indicate its true existence). See also enclosed pictures (bit poor resolution but the best I was able to pick up).
If you ‘Google’ for example the paper with the title “Alliin and related active components:research advances” you see both titles popping up so indeed both are the same. The “Journal of International Pharmaceutical Research” ISSN 1674-0440 is Scopus indexed: https://www.scopus.com/sourceid/21100881509 which seems to correspond to the above mentioned genuine Chinese subscription-based journal.
Then the deception starts...
However, this journal is hijacked by “Journal of International Pharmaceutical Research” using the same ISSN nr. 1674-0440: http://ijprjournals.com/ with contact: ijprjournals@gmail.com
Since 2009 there is a journal with the similar name as the genuine Chinese one “International Journal of Pharmaceutical Research (IJPR)”, but with a different ISSN 0975-2366 that seems to be indexed in Scopus: https://www.scopus.com/sourceid/19700174645 This journal “International Journal of Pharmaceutical Research (IJPR)” with ISSN 0975-2366 (http://ijpronline.com/Default.aspx ) presents itself as a subscription-based journal though all papers can be found on RG and/or Academia.edu and once submitting https://www.ejmanager.com/my/ijpr/ it appears you have to pay fee which is misleading and dubious. They use a SCImago link (with a picture of the wrong journal “Journal of international pharmaceutical research”): https://www.scimagojr.com/journalsearch.php?q=19700174645&tip=sid&exact=no
I predict that this journal will be discontinued soon, since last year they ‘all of a sudden’ published 690 papers in 2019 and 2488 papers in 2020 (while it ‘normally’ was round 50 or so).
So:
http://ijprjournals.com/ fake and hijacked version of the real one with ISSN 1674-0440
http://ijpronline.com/Default.aspx predatory and one better stay away from (presumably they will lose their Scopus indexing).
Best regards.
PS. Both the IJPRonline site and SCImago make a mess out of it since they depict the image of “Journal of International Pharmaceutical Research” ISSN 1674-0440: https://www.scopus.com/sourceid/21100881509 while they talk about “International Journal of Pharmaceutical Research”.
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The people at Scopus should hire me 😊 In the recent update of the list of discontinued titles in Scopus (see enclosed file) the journal “International Journal of Pharmaceutical Research” (https://www.scopus.com/sourceid/19700174645 ) is now discontinued.
PS. Unfortunately, Scopus is not that fast in correcting/updating the Scopus sources site (but will happen soon).
Best regards.
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We are preparing to submit a manuscript in field of Computational Chemistry (Computer aided-drug design). However. due to our current budget we won't be able to afford the cost of the processing fees charged by most open access journals.
Is there any available free-to-publish journal(s) that can publish our work - either open access or "society" journals?
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International Journal of Advanced Chemistry
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In peer review,
Does the innovative of idea in article is besed on methodolgy , or study area, or the used dataset or all of them?
How editors and reviewers evaluate the innovative idea of article ?
Thanks in advance
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Dear B.G. Mousa "How editors and reviewers evaluate the innovative idea of article?" For some more general information about this topic please see this useful article entitled
"How to Evaluate Ideas"
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There are several journals with varying impact factors. Still we find journals having no impact factor. I want to know whether the impact or importance of a researcher becomes less to a scientific community when he/she publishes a paper in a journal with low impact factor or no impact factor?
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Dear All, I may be old-fashioned, but in my personal opinion publishing in high-ranked and high-IF journal is the best way to make your valuable research visible to exopert colleagues in your field of research. Please see in this context this closely related RG thread entitled "How do you increase the visibility of published article?"
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I like a lot this one - http://www.doaj.org
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Google scholar.
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While APCs (fees for publication costs or fees for open access) vary, some of them are quite high as 1000-2000 CHF. Although some publishers have schemes for waiving APCs for researchers from underdeveloped and developing countries, the amount is still quite high for the authors.
I was wondering about the practices of different institutions and countries:
- What is the current policy of your university/research institute/country on APCs?
- Where do the funds come from for APCs? and,
- Who is eligible for the funds?
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As private scholar, I am inclined to say: from the taxpayer.
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Dear all,
I am a neuroscientist with a focus on imaging analyses in stroke populations.
My first scientific works were decently well received and were published in journals like Human Brain Mapping, Neuroimage or Neuroimage Clinical. The first two journals - both leading journals in the field of brain imaging - recently transitioned from subscription to full gold open access journals, the latter was established as an gold OA journal that I paid ~1.500€ for in 2016.
Today, publishing in these journals requires a fee betwen 2.900€ and 3.200€. Due to the Wiley DEAL with German universities, the fee for HBM is actually slightly lower, at ~2.400€. The same price range applies to many other OA journals.
At my university in Germany, we can pay OA publications thanks to a publication fund of the German Research Foundation, that pays OA fees up to 2.000€. However, this fund does not support publications at all that exceed 2.000€. A fee of 2.001€ has to be fully paid by the authors.
This is a fee that I cannot pay in any legal way. Even if I had a full research project grant of 3 years (worth a few hundred thousand €) by the German Research Foundation, this would only include 2.250€ support for publication fees - for a whole 3 year project that often yields multiple publications.
Note that I am aware that I don't need to publish in these journals, because more reasonably priced alternatives exist, as well as classic subscription journals. I could just publish everything in PlosONE. However, I am not an important, well-known or powerful scientist. We do not need to pretend that we only judge scientific works after reading them, but in fact quite much by the journal they were published in. And even if YOU don't do so, the next reviewer of my grant proposal might do so, judging a large body of low-impact journal papers as bad, while preferring the grant proposal of another researcher who published a large body of medium to high impact, expensive journal papers.
My question to you: How do you handle this situation? How do you pay the fees?
I also wonder if I am just too much of a novice in science, so that I eventually missed common strategies that nobody talks about. Some colleagues - with other PIs - told me that they just submit papers without considering the fees at all, because the PIs are willing and able to pay for impact.
Or is it just normal to include the department head as a co-author in some common, but shady agreement so that the department pays for it? If yes, how does this work? Can I be open about this or do I rather have to pretend I need feedback or similar 'scientific' input first to not be considered rude?
Or is it just my PI who might be unwilling to support my research output, because it is anyway a common practice to illeagly misapplicate funding bodies for such fees?
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This is not an answer, just a rant:
The fact that many scientists (including those with substantial power over the careers of others) often judge the quality of work largely based on their personal perceptions of the journals that published said work is a fundamental problem in how science and scientists are currently appraised. Subjective impressions of author and/or journal prestige should never factor into the assessment of scientific work; the very worst papers that I have ever reviewed have been for "high-tier" journals (e.g. Brain) and come from "prestigious" research groups. These have also been the groups that were most resistant to requested revisions.
One major root of this problem is scientific publishing companies themselves.
I cannot see them as anything other than parasites that have thoroughly infiltrated academic science and made themselves central to how scientific works (and scientists) are perceived and evaluated, despite the arguable fact that they contribute little-to-nothing of value to the work itself (other than copy-editing and web-hosting). I find it infuriating that I get paid a flat, taxpayer-funded salary (that is much less than my market value outside of academia) on a short-term contract to perform highly skilled technical labor (i.e. experiments, analyses, etc.) and produce high-quality media content (i.e. scientific papers), which I then either:
(1) give to a massive and highly profitable publisher for free so that a (probably unpaid) editor can recruit (via e-mail) unpaid reviewers (that I often must suggest and provide contact information for myself) to curate the content before the publisher accepts it (or rejects it), makes some formatting changes, slaps their branding on it, hosts it on the internet, and then sells it back to the authors, reviewers, and all of the other taxpayer-funded content creators/curators at extremely high profit margins,
or
(2) pay several thousand tax-payer dollars to a massive and highly profitable publisher publisher so that the publisher can do basically the same thing with the exception that instead of selling the final product back to everyone involved in its creation/curation, the publisher posts it on an open-access online repository that differs minimally from institutional repositories or pre-print servers.
In either case, the final product is likely to differ only superficially from the version that I posted (for free) on a pre-print server or here on RG.
The knowledge that the primary entities that tangibly benefit from my taxpayer-funded labor are...for-profit publishing companies that obtain their content for free (or are PAID to receive the content), have it edited and curated for free, and then sell it at ridiculous margins (or were paid ridiculous margins to put their branding on it) back to the people who actually created it, along with the knowledge that many scientists either don't realize or don't care that journals are essentially ALL predatory 3rd-party profit-generation-machines that contribute significantly to many of the problems with how science/scientists are evaluated, how studies are done/reported, and what scientists prioritize in their work (e.g. clean seemingly simple results with nice stories and methods online only), legitimately makes me want to leave science altogether. I truly, deeply, hate the research culture that has been built by previous generations, with scientific publishing being culprit #1 (culprit #2 being the fundamentally exploitative nature of post-graduate academic research positions such as post-docs).
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How reputed is IntechOpen? A publisher of Open Access books. Anyone has experience?
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Highly reputed and the publications also cited in many reputed indexed journals
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In case my article is accepted in an open access journal (e.g. MDPI group) and I have to pay article processing charges (APC) to support open access but I do not have enough funds in my account then what are the options to pay APC.
Looking for funding agencies that can only support regarding APC and/or any individual from plant sciences (Plant Breeding and Genetics) who provides financial support on certain terms and conditions.
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Following
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Dear friends, I am working on several research projects related to food waste but I don't know where to publish them. If I can get someone to suggest
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You can try springe publication
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Alternative models to measure the quality of research are the personal citation indexes (H-index). Is that true?
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It's my impression that Google Scholar provides a rather complete list of one's publications-articles, books, book chapters. Of course, it does not really address the quality of publications.
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My colleagues and I issue a journal "Social Phenomena". It is an nonprofit independent platform for scholars who support the open science movement and wish to share their knowledge with others. The mission of our journal is to help authors share their ideas with the Russian-speaking scientific audience. We translate all articles into Russian and publish them for free in open access. We also do not charge authors any fees because we believe that there is no place for commerce in science.
The theme of the next issue is "Giftedness: the conditions and factors". We welcome all authors from various branches of science who are interested in this topic and want to make their research open to fellow Russian scholars.
The additional info is in the attached file and here http://journal.socialphenomena.org/en/
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Very interesting
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Now a days almost all the publishers are encouraging to do open access publications. However, many academicians says that open access or online publications are not good and publishers are compromising with the quality of research publication due to publication fee.
What is your opinion? Kindly let me know.
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When it comes to open access it is very important to distinguish between predatory journals (and publishers behind those journals) and genuine and legit ones.
Open access provides multiple advantages including obviously access for free to anyone interested in your work (instead of being disappointed once you found a potentially interesting paper which you cannot access because it is (still even after decades) behind a paywall.
After a pioneering period nowadays the open access movement is a serious and well-established publication model. Basically, all publishers have journals dedicated to open access publishing with a well-established reputation, like for example:
Springer Nature:
-Nature Communications (impact factor: 12.121)
-Scientific Reports (impact factor: 3.998)
Elsevier:
-Cell reports (impact factor: 8.109)
-iScience (impact factor: 4.447)
Royal Society of Chemistry:
-Chemical Science (impact factor: 9.346), for free!
Furthermore, there are now well-established publishers fully dedicated to open access, like:
MDPI:
-International Journal of Molecular Sciences (impact factor: 4.556)
Frontiers:
-Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology (impact factor: 5.201)
So, the assumption or even assertion that open access is, by definition, declining scientific quality is simply not true. Sure there are issues (like the accessibility of open access due to high APC’s and the mentioned predatory menace) but stating that open access is a danger to science and subscription based publishing is flawless is a lacking the necessary nuance needed in this discussion.
Best regards.
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Is the information published by BEALL'S LIST about Potential predatory scholarly open‑access publishers available in the following link accurate and reliable?
The Last updated of this page was on June 09, 2020.
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The suggested sites by Sumaia Mohammed Al-Ghuribi are indeed good resources for older cases, however I have reasons to believe that they are not well updated. For example:
“TEST Engineering & Management” in list of stand-alone journals
“GIAP journals” in list of publishers
Are mentioned in the Beall’s list and not in the predatoryjournals.com lists. So, the Beall’s list sites you indicated are the best available.
Having said this indeed the list is:
-Not fully up to date. According to the changelog (https://beallslist.net/changelog/ ) the last update was on 13th of June. Some new players being presumably predatory are not included (yet), see for example:
-The list is not flawless since there is also criticism on the inclusion of certain journals and publishers in the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beall%27s_List For example and I quote: “The list's 82% accuracy rate in the Who's Afraid of Peer Review? sting operation led Phil Davis to state that "Beall is falsely accusing nearly one in five as being a 'potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open access publisher' on appearances alone."[15]” [15] Davis, Phil (October 4, 2013). "Open Access "Sting" Reveals Deception, Missed Opportunities". The Scholarly Kitchen.
Personally I think that 20% being wrongfully included is somewhat high, but for example Bentham Open (https://benthamopen.com/ ) and Frontiers (https://www.frontiersin.org/ ) are the best examples of the fact that the Beall’s list is not flawless. These publishers do not belong in the list for sure. Still I use the Beall’s list anytime I come across a for me unknown journal or publisher and let’s say in 9 out of 10 times I have to agree: there is something wrong here and the suspicion of being predatory is most likely true.
So yes, most of the times a great tool in identification of a predatory journal, but one need to keep thinking for yourself and make your own judgement. In order to check whether you are dealing with a predatory journal (or publisher, be aware that quite often not the individual journal but the publisher behind it is mentioned) looking at the Beall’s list is basically the first step. If mentioned, the checking for yourself starts, I recommend the workflow as mentioned in:
Laine, C., & Winker, M. A. (2017). Identifying predatory or pseudo-journals. Biochemia medica: Biochemia medica, 27(2), 285-291.
Article Identifying Predatory or Pseudo-Journals
Best regards.
PS. See for a report on some aspects of the Beall’s list and how to deal with it:
Method Predatory journals and publishers: a menace to science and s...
The list of hijacked journals (an if possible, even worse phenomenon than predatory) is pretty accurate: https://beallslist.net/hijacked-journals/ and for the more recent not included (yet) ones I keep up my own list:
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Many journal publishers are opening their COVID-19 researches for free to the public. Among them which are the most useful? Is more famous one the better one?
If you got a research on COVID-19 on hand, which one of the following will you submit to ?
Which one is easiest to accept your publication?
Please vote as you like!
Other than those common opened platform below, you can also suggest any new ones you think is useful for COVID-19 research.
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Good question
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COVID-19 is putting a huge impact on the society by the isolation measures it brings. People are now working from home office, and every walks of life are pausing their usual work and life.
How about the booming exponential rise in COVID-19 researches? But a shut downed administrative team of the publishing office? And the loss of manpower towards battle over the. COVID-19 frontline?
With the limited journal space, will timely researches be delayed in publication? Which may miss out important messages towards the public!
Peer Review: Publishing in the time of COVID-19
DOI: 10.7554/eLife.57162
What's your view?
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Yes, I expect a delay in the publishing process under COVID-19.
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The book I have edited with my colleagues is now published open access. This is the link to the publication https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/311959. How to add this to the publication because it is not a file, it is a link?
Thank you!
Maritta Törrönen
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Step 1. Download your book using the following link:
Step 2. Upload your book to your RG profile. Your book is in PDF format, so you shouldn't have a problem with it.
I hope my comments will be useful.
Best regards,
Dr. Vardan Atoyan
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If one has a (maybe transient) link to an open access version of a paper, how can we post it? Of course one can upload the unedited manuscript, but we all know that the edited one is much nicer to read...
We published one apper and I got a link, but dont know where to post it:
I can't post it as supplement (file needed), nor anywhere on the article page and there is no format which can be used to created a new contribution...
I found a similar question but without a usable idea (besides building a document including the link)
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Best way to link your article by giving DOI info.
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What is the main aspect you take into account when you plan to publish a good journal paper?
a) Journal impact factor, b) Journal reputation in the field, c) Publication speed, d) acceptance/rejection rate, e) Open access fees, f) Other aspects (please say)
You may choose one option only or re-order the options as you think more important.
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Abdelrahman Zaky All are important and to me, no hierachichal order. It is equally important to know that I like to pay attention to author guidelines. Sometime, some journals are "toxic" against giving giving room to comfortably submit an article. These journals may limit number of authors, they may precisely stict against the number of words, among other inconveniencies to settle with them. All in all, what you have stated remain pry concerns to consider.
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This question is only one of several questions posed in our recently published open access paper at https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/11/12/1430/pdf
1. What is the minimal number of degrees of freedom needed to describe the electromagnetic field of a single moving source? Same question for a gravitational field. Same question for any field propagating with the speed of light.
2. Is it possible to capture all of the information about such a field in one scalar, complex-valued pre-potential?
3. Can such a pre-potential be defined invariantly with respect to the Lorentz group? the conformal group?
4. Can the Lienard-Wiechert potential be derived without assuming an inverse-square law?
5. Must the electromagnetic field of a single moving source be either self-dual or anti-self-dual?
For (most of) the answers, see our recently published open access paper at
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I'm sorry, I'm not sure how you answered questions 1 - 5. Could you please explain or point to specific pages in your pdf files?
Thank you,
Tzvi
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I am sharing the information about the list of hijacked and predatory journals. It is very very important for scientists across the globe particularly for young scientists who have little knowledge about the journals.
I am also attaching real journals' list for your information.
This is a list of journals that appear to have been hijacked, meaning that their websites or branding have been co-opted by a predatory journal or publisher. List of Hijacked Journals: https://predatoryjournals.com/hijacked/
Potential predatory scholarly open‑access publishers, BEALL'S LIST OF PREDATORY
JOURNALS AND PUBLISHERS: https://beallslist.weebly.com/
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useful information.
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Nowadays, while submitting articles for publishing in impact factor journals, there is an option to submit and publish traditionally without cost or submit/publish for open access with the cost. I would like to know what is the effect on the speed of review and possibilities of publication in case of selecting either of the ways?
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Thanks, Alhuseen Omar Alsayed for a detailed answer.
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Dear Colleagues,
I just wanted to share some interesting insight from an "experiment" with open access. Recently I published a paper about Blockchain and SCM with Emerald Publishing. The paper was online for several weeks and I had roughly 15 downloads a day:
Fortunately, the publisher offered me to make the paper open access (I do not have any specific funding for that):
After that, the downloads tripled with roughly 40-50 downloads a day. Of course, this does not say anything about how often the paper will get cited, but it clearly shows that OA fills a need. It might also widen the gap between those institutions who can afford to pay for it and those who can not. In other words: research from affluent institutions might also get cited more, since it is simply easier to access it.
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This will not only uplift the paper and the authors but will definitely raise the impact factor of the journal. I think they should have considered your APC waived or rather they are formally expecting your official request, please do this with a reasonable excuse, possibly accompanied with a letter from your institution giving reasons why you cannot shoulder the cost. Many people always say those reputable journals do not charge, but I disagree with this standpoint, even though some give a long time embargo before being openly made accessible. The cost of publication, following huge expenses on researches for researchers, is huge especially without grant or other sponsorships.
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My current affiliation doesn't provide funding for open-access publishing. Are there any organizations that provide funding for open-access publishing, given that the topic is valuable enough? Or are there open-access journals that waive the article processing charges (APCs) for researchers in third-world countries?
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If your institution is not providing any funding then there is definitely not any other way to get funded however, you can consider open choice journals that do not charge any fee and have comparatively more significance than an open access journal
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I was looking for a thread on Bentham Science Publishers on RG but could not find any.
I recently got an invitation fro the Current Environmental Engineering journal to act as a guest editor. In the email (see below), there was no mention of the group to which the journal belonged. I had to search the Internet for quite a while to eventually find it belonged to Bentham Science Publishers. This publisher appears to be quite questionable and Jeffrey Beall listed it as a potential predatory publisher.
Have you had any encounter with Current Environmental Engineering or Bentham Science Publishers yet? What do you think of them?
Thank you very much to you all for your valuable contributions which will benefit to us all.
Here is the email in question:
Current Environmental Engineering
23 August 2019
Dr. M. Ertz
LaboNFC
Universit du Qubec Chicoutimi
555
Boulevard de l\Universit
Canada
Dear Dr. Ertz,
Current Environmental Engineering (CEE), is in the process of appointing Executive Guest Editors. This journal publishes in all areas of environmental sustainability, disaster risk reduction and management, decision and policy making. We would like to propose your name for the position of Executive Guest Editor of Current Environmental Engineering.
Executive Guest Editors are appointed for a period of three years and are expected to submit a proposal for the first thematic issue in a hot and emerging field within 3 months. They are also expected to submit one thematic issue each subsequent year.
The peer review of the articles may be arranged by the guest editor, provided that the list of referees for each article is pre-approved by us. The reviewers should be neutral experts with H-index of above 15. The guest editor would be expected to provide us with at least two referee reports of each article. Publication of thematic issue would be facilitated by the use of our state- of- the- art, article processing system.
The Executive Guest Editors will be entitled to the following benefits:
  1. A brief CV and photograph of the Executive Guest Editor will be displayed on the journal’s website.
  2. Executive Guest Editors will be entitled to a waiver of the Open Access fee for any article authored by him/her in their thematic issue (Open Access publishing provides wide accessibility of the article and is normally a paid service. To view some of the Open access articles in the journal, please visit the journal website).
  3. The Executive Guest Editor will receive a free online access to the journal for the calendar year in which their thematic issue is published.
  4. The Executive Guest Editor will be given free online access to any 3 books of his/her choice from the Bentham list of E Books.
  5. The Executive Guest Editor will receive a hard copy of the published thematic issue for personal use.
If this position is of interest to you, please let us know. If you are interested, then kindly send us your brief CV and a list of your recent publications. Kindly also indicate the field of the journal relevant to your area of research.
In case you are not interested in the position of Executive Guest Editor, then you are welcome to submit a general article that fits in to the Aims and Scope of the journal.
We look forward to hearing from you in this regard.
Sincerely,
M. Alam
Director (Publications)
[If you prefer not to receive any further emails, please send us an email with the subject line “UNSUBSCRIBE”]
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Bentham Science Publishers is a company that publishes journals and e-books and is based at Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, with numerous operating units in for example the United States, Japan and the Netherlands. Numerous Bentham Science journals have received JCR impact factors.
However they started an exclusively open-access branch: Bentham Open. This ‘Bentham’ has received criticism and was/is listed as a "potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publisher" in Jeffrey Beall's list of Predatory Publishers.
Bentham (Open) has become notorious of spamming scientists with invitations to become members of the editorial boards of its journals. Especially their relative young and not yet established journals use this ‘tactic’ of sending emails to researchers regardless whether their expertise corresponds to the scope of that particular journal.
Having said all this. New journals and publishers need to their very best to get noticed, attract researchers to publish and gradually establish a name (and reputation). One cannot blame those who choose the more aggressive (marketing) strategy, similar like commercials (we all notice that companies either choose the well though, sometimes even funny or moving ones or they go for the annoying, often insulting our intelligence kind of commercials like those for washing powders and so on).
No matter whether you like their approach or not, Bentham Science Publishers seems to manage to get a substantial part of their journal in the right indexes (ESCI, SCI, Scopus, PubMed), although mostly moderate impact factors, and have been able to attract a number of well-established names to publish their work in their journals. Bentham Open is starting to get a number of their journals in serious indexes as well (ESCI, Scopus, PubMed).
So it hard to say whether it is good thing to get involved with this publisher or not. The ‘world’ is in need of more platforms/venues/services besides the big players like Elsevier and Springer Nature. Nowadays publishers of exclusively Open Access journals like MDPI, Plos and Hindawi are more and more established and it would not surprise me that at some point in time Bentham will be part of this as well.
Best regards.
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What do you think about GROWING SCIENCE PUBLISHER .It is a Canadian online publisher of open access academic without any article processing charges (APCs) and with a short time for reviewing.
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The publisher is mentioned in Beall’s list of predatory publishers:
That is a sign but more importantly it is something to check for yourself.
On the other hand they claim to ask for no fee which is a-typical for a predatory publisher, however you might wonder how they earn some money on this (all I can find is a subscription fee system, but why should you pay for a subscription if you access everything for free I wonder).
What argues against the potential predatory is:
-They’ve managed to get a number of their journals in Scopus and one in the journals in ESCI (Clarivate Analytics).
-A number of their journals are indexed in DOAJ so that all seems valid.
-Papers seems to have a legitimate DOI and can be found in Google Scholar.
Hard to say whether this publisher indeed belongs on the list of potential predatory or not. I tend to say no but strongly advice anyone who want to publish in one of their journals to check the relevant journal in your field and check a number of papers published earlier.
Best regards.
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JCR released impact factor list 2017 for journals. About 66 percent of the journals with an increased Journal Impact Factor and Quarterly journal of economics has Highest Journal Impact Factor Percentile Score This Year i.e. 99.856. PLoS One published about 22,077 articles and ranked 5th for total citations and ranked at 2,498 by Average Journal Impact Factor Percentile
Link of 2017 Journal Citation Reports:
How to get list of journals with new impact factor, specifically journals in social sciences
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Journal Impact Factor list should be available for free so that people can report errors, if any. Making use of this list will automatically benefit WoS Clarivate.
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Does anybody know of any initiatives, other than Publons that gives credit to peer-reviewers, that lobbies for free open access publishing? It would be great if peer-reviewers got publication discounts from open access publishers. Paid open access seems to discriminates against 'poor' universities & researchers who cannot pay out of their own pocket and for those researchers that publish a lot. It does not seem ethical to pay for own publications - the richest will publish the most, especially considering all the predatory journals that would publish any poor quality materials for money, Scholars are doing their peer-reviews for free and publishers get paid for publishing their work...
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Unpaid peer review has long between a tradition in subscription-based journals, but it has become more controversial with journals that charge for submissions. Indeed, some of the journals that charge submission fees do offer discounts on those fees and other rewards for reviewing (for example, Elsevier offers temporary access to SCOPUS). If you want to be compensated for reviewing, then limit your reviewing to journals that offer those kinds of rewards.
Otherwise, consider the non-monetary rewards: a chance to read pre-publication work in your field, a chance to influence the direction of your field, a chance to build relationships with editors, and a chance to build your CV by showing that other professionals value your judgments. Plus, there is a chance to multiple all of those effects by being invited onto an editorial board, etc.
At least in the social sciences, we get the opportunity to read the other reviews, and to see how the editors used their suggestions along with our own to reach a decision. I personally feel like I have learned a lot from that process -- both as a reviewer and as an author.
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Are we, as a scoentofoc community, get into a situation where where we compromise against the quality of the reaserch paper when the same is published in a journal by paying for each publication? The journals also might not view very stringently on the quality compared to the journals which are subscription-based.
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Azad,
It depends - but I sense that you are suggesting that open access generally equates to poorer quality compared to subscription. That is not routinely the case. I would argue that most 'legitimate' open access journals (both new and more established) publish good quality research. In this case, they do not 'contaminate or compromise' research. I'm wondering if you might more be associating open access with 'predatory' journals? If that is the case, then all 'neophyte/new' researchers should be discouraged from submitting to them. They will pay money and their research is not viewed or valued by anyone (which counters your point on widespread dissemination). With reputable open access journals - such as Biomed's BMC series (I am an Associate Editor for BMC Public Health), then new researchers should be fully encouraged. These journals are often still competitive though - and often with good Impact Factors - so publication is not guaranteed - but there is a good chance of quality.
Paying for a journal article, in open access, does also not mean compromising oneself. Many internal and external research grants now accommodate addition al funding for publication in open access. It has advantages to the funders i.e. potentially quicker publication and more access/citation. There is also the recent 'backlash' against the expensive business model of some of the larger subscription publishing houses i.e. Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis etc.
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The paper was presented (oral presentation) in Medical Education Conference, CUMEC 2018, in which 6 authors were included. It included the people who did not contributed to the paper. Principal investigator's name was put as a second author. The paper presenter put her name as a first author.
Later, the same paper (same title) was published in open access journal in October 2018. But this time Principal investigator's name was mentioned as first author, removal of some authors and inclusion of one author who just involved in article writing.
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You are writing in passive voice (was) so it is not clear who made these decisions. Who made the decision to include people who were not involved? Who had the authority to put the P. I.'s name second? Who made the changes when the actual paper was published?
Sounds like possibly the "corresponding author" made some decisions without talking to others on the writing team. Occasionally journals get these things wrong, but they generally publish the names as told to them by the writers.
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Open access journals are associated with a lot of money but frequently also with worse quality of published works. However, this is an opportunity for young scientists to publish their research results, as well as the possibility of widespread dissemination.
What is more important?
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Miroslaw,
There is a counter-case to what you state in your first sentence. Open access journals often only make enough money for publication costs and to invest in promoting and growing the journal. Also, I would argue that most 'legitimate' open access journals (both new and more established) publish good quality research. In this case, they do not 'contaminate' research. I'm wondering if you might more be associating open access with 'predatory' journals? If that is the case, then all 'neophyte/new' researchers should be discouraged from submitting to them. They will pay money and their research is not viewed or valued by anyone (which counters your point on widespread dissemination). With reputable open access journals - such as Biomed's BMC series (I am an Associate Editor for BMC Public Health), then new researchers should be fully encouraged. These journals are often still competitive though - and often with good Impact Factors - so publication is not guaranteed.
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Hello, dear research community. Very recently we faced various reactions from various journals to a scientific work that we submitted to their expertise. I did not really understand the reasons for these reactions and especially the very large discrepancy between them from one scientific journal to another. I would like you to enlighten me a little, so that I can draw some conclusions and get tougher for the future.
Less than 24 hours after our submission in the first scientific journal, we received notification from one of the editors in chief, rejecting our paper and stating that "the work reported in it was not yet ready for publication in a leading journal". Then, he suggested that we first publish papers in conferences before re-submitting our work. I did not understand this analysis very well. First because the response time (less than 24 hours) seemed short to me and second because the paper was still well evaluated in our team, before being submitted. Are conferences an obligatory part of the process ? Or did the scientific journal in question just assess the risk it would take to start analyzing a paper that was more likely to be rejected in the end ?
We then submitted the paper without changing it to the second scientific journal we had listed. This seemed to be the most appropriate journal for our work because it had in its columns several papers dealing with the same issues as ours. Moreover, about 20% of our literature review came from the papers in this journal alone. To our great surprise, our paper was rejected a month later on the grounds that "the subject you are discussing is outside the scope of this journal". Here, I did not understand why it took a month to come to such a conclusion and also I did not understand this conclusion at all. What could explain this ?
We submitted the paper without changing anything to the third scientific journal listed (no less brilliant than the other two according to the usual tools for measuring the quality of scientific journals) and it initiated the peer-review process less than two weeks after submission.
Please help me to understand these various reactions using your respective experiences. There are certainly some things we have omitted on our side and perhaps logical explanations for the behaviour specific to each leading journal. Thank you in advance!
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Hi, Milliam,
As you have discovered, there is a fairly high level of idiosyncrasy in the peer review process. In my field I have noted that editors do define their roles quite differently from one journal to another. Some understand their role to include an initial screening of submissions in order not to overburden their reviewers with manuscripts the editor assesses as unsuitable. Others quickly submit everything to peer review, but assume something of a final decision-maker in the process by sometimes overruling peer reviews. Others accept the peer reviews as authoritative.
As you gain more experience in the publishing process, you will get a feel for the approach different editors take and will be able to direct your manuscripts to those more likely to give it a fair review.
I do want to applaud your response to your first rejection. There is really no reason to revise a manuscript that you believe in just because it is rejected - especially if that rejection is not from blind peer reviewers. Every time a manuscript is resubmitted to another journal, some degree of editing is probably advisable to make sure that the manuscript complies with the instruction for authors and journal style/purpose, but extensive revisions for a rejection are largely a waste of time. Wait until you receive some version of "revise and resubmit" before laboring over review notes. My writing mentor used to say, "When you have 10 rejections, then it may be time to revise." Keeping a manuscript under review is the best way to eventually become published.
Finally, I think the expectation of presenting at a conference is more likely in closely-knit disciplines with relative few conference opportunities. In others, there is really no need to do this unless you believe that it is possible to obtain feedback that will improve the quality of your work.
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I am planning to design a litterature review about the ANS component (parasympathetic-sympathetic-enteral) as the original label and hypothesis that actually it should be renamed more appropriately according to recent evidence that this autonomic system is involved in neuro-endocrino-immunological processes hence suggesting to renamed it as the neuro-endocrino-immunological autonomic system (NEIAS).
I am independant researcher and I am looking for colleagues having interest in the neuro-endocrino-immunologic system (ANS) field to particpate with me in this litterature review, e.g., one/more could focus on the PSN, another one on the SNS and lastly another one on the ENS.
Ideally this research would have to be supported (funding) by one of the co-author university (to support at least the cost of open access publishing).
I would appreciate your comments and any help if interested to participate in this original subject.
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I am wandering if my idea would be best follow a more simple question first as my project: Renaming the ANS, does it make sense? Actually I think that a more comprehensive literature review research with supportive statistical results could then answer the hypothesis of my first project. Any comment would be valuable. Note that my literature review project is still on track :)
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Novice authors wishing to publish in an international journal are often lost for choice when deciding where to send the first draft.
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journal for teachers of English as a second language
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Which journal is better for publication: with open access and free of charge but with low IF or high IF journal without possibility to publish open access (due to high charges)?
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I think it is difficult to choose! For opsen access, it provides you with a chance to share your information or manuscript among researchers while high impact factors journals increase this chance. However,
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Now a days almost all the publishers provide option to publish open access or print. According to you which publication is better and why? .
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I prefer open access publications.
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Hi !
Can anyone provide me any insight about availability of published/open access data of soil heavy metal/ trace element concentration with the GPS location? We are developing a model and need a good amount of spatial data to test the model.
However, it will be extremely helpful if any researcher/individual/ research group is having such data with them and is ready to share it with us for the above purpose. We will be citing the paper with due acknowledgement for the help extended.
For any further details please feel free to drop a message.
** N.B. : Data with concentrations above the permissible limit will be of much help.
Thanks in advance.
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@Kajori Parial.....A colleague of mine has a day like that in Ghana. You can contact him on daikins@umat.edu.gh
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An article submitted by a colleague to a journal was found to be published by a person totally unknown to the research team and our institution in an open access journal. It is an exact copy but for two words! We have written to the journal but have received no response. The single author has provided a generic e-mail and we are unable to identify their academic affiliation. How does one deal with this?
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Isn't it enough to post your article at the excellent site arXiv? It is then date-stamped, making sure you can show people who came first.
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Are there any websites that host downloadable ct/mri datasets ? I know about some websites but not many
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Hi David, I can say I know who to contact and they can be shared but not publicly for example....
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  • Stated that, "By 1 January 2020 scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants provided by participating national and European research councils and funding bodies, must be published in compliant OA Journals or on compliant OA Platforms,”
  • Let us suppose, if all the journals are OA then what about the scientists of low-income countries/limited funding/without funding.
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That will be a great service to science.
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I'm considering writing a "Speech Processing 101" compendium for the course I'm teaching, because I'm not aware of any existing good material for such a course. That leads up to two questions:
- Could you recommend a forum for publishing educational material with an open-access license?
- Alternatively, are you aware of a good resource for Speech Processing 101, with an emphasis on the DSP side (=it's not about speech recognition).
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Hi
There are several repositories and platforms to publish Open Educational Resources.
To have a good overview, I would recommend to visit the site «OER World Map» (https://oerworldmap.org).
Additionally, I think you could have a look at the following publishing houses:
- Meson Press: https://meson.press/
subjects: digital cultures and networked media
subjects: mainly humanities and social sciences
Best
Anne-Katharina
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Impact Factor (IF) is one of the journal quality measures, but beside arguing about this measure, it is not easy for researchers to find the correct IF of any journal. One may say that we should depend on the IF calculation produced by Thomson Reuters. However, there is an issue here: it is not easy to find their report! And another issue: it is not easy to find the IF of a specific journal in their report (e.g., see attached file). On the other hand, some journals write their IF on their website, but don't declare where they got this IF.
There are some sites that calculate journal IFs such as:
But I think that what's most risky here is publishing in a fake journal. For example, this website http://fakejournalss.wordpress.com/list-of-fake-computer-science-journals/
has a list of fake journals, but are they really fake?
Is there any way to know the true quality of journals and to avoid fake ones?
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We receive many messages about additions to the list of journals or publishers that are on the established DOAJ list, which is supposed to be a whitelist of journals or publishers. Professor GEORGES answers you here ...
For reasons explained in this article, we will not consider DOAJ's list as a whitelist and all predatory publishers or journals indexed by DOAJ will remain on Dolos list.
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I strongly disagree with professor Georges where he is trying to force his line of thinking on every scientists. Whatever he is saying is nothing but his personal opinion and he has no right to make these public in order to brain-wash every scientists right to publish their work in their journal of choice. Treat this as a warning message.