Thanks, I'll pass

People send me stuff. I got this email today with the subject: Publish Your Research Paper

And then I read the image that was the advertisement for the new journal.

Yo, I’m invited to contribute “resarch”.

Source image: http://isrj.net/prospect/isrj.jpg

You’d think they’d have somebody proofread this before sending it out via mass email. There were hundreds of .edu addresses in the email I got.

The website says:

All research papers submitted to the journal will be double – blind peer reviewed referred by members of the editorial Board readers will include investigator in universities, research institutes government and industry with research interest in the general subjects.

Hmm, seems nobody peer reviewed their mailing.

But, I wonder if they do any actual peer review, or if this is simply another “pay for play” fake journal.

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December 28, 2013 8:41 pm

I like ‘academecian”.

Admin
December 28, 2013 8:46 pm

The all caps is a nice touch.
I MEANT THE ALL CAPS IS A NICE TOUCH!!!!!!!!!!

deadwood
December 28, 2013 8:55 pm

I like the fake Hawaiian conferences even better!

December 28, 2013 8:57 pm

Even better: “CALL FOR ARTILCE”.

Editor
December 28, 2013 8:57 pm
BUT THEY WERE SMALLER THAN USUAL ALL-CAPS!
Felix
December 28, 2013 9:02 pm
December 28, 2013 9:02 pm

genuinely FAKE!

RACookPE1978
Editor
December 28, 2013 9:06 pm

Sounds good.
On the other hand, I only use my paper for amateur streams …. (The professional ones always want hard water for their practicle experiments, don’t cha know.)

December 28, 2013 9:14 pm

Oh my goodness. Will they have a call center?

wws
December 28, 2013 9:23 pm

I find that it makes much more sense if you read it aloud in a high pitched, halting voice, accenting the wrong syllables while altering ones intonation frequently.
Try it!

Chad Wozniak
December 28, 2013 9:26 pm

Was Obamacare behind this? About their speed.

David
December 28, 2013 9:30 pm

They nailed ‘multidisciplinary’,
…to publish researches …by inviting yo to contribute resarch …a platform for reseacher …We invite you & …reearch scholars
but they seem a bit flummoxed by ‘research’

jdgalt
December 28, 2013 9:32 pm

I didn’t see “practicle” in there. But somehow I doubt their “reearch” will get any results.

Adam
December 28, 2013 9:46 pm

The background image of a hand writing stuff is enough to convince me it is genuine. But the impact factor is only 1.7, usually I only publish in >3.

MattS
December 28, 2013 9:53 pm

I have for sale, genuine imitation artificial leather [insert article of clothing or furniture here]. 🙂

December 28, 2013 9:54 pm

Is there any connection between this and where BEST was finally published? See:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/19/berkeley-earth-finally-makes-peer-review/#comment-1203622
Quote from link:
“India-based OMICS Publishing Group has just launched a new brand of scholarly journals called “SciTechnol.” This new OMICS brand lists 53 new journals, though none has any content yet.

ldd
December 28, 2013 10:07 pm

Maybe Kiji would be interested. 😉

Richard Keen
December 28, 2013 10:07 pm

Some years ago – at least 15 or 20, since I still remember it – our local school district (the largest in Colorado) advertised a hiring search for a middle school “Principle”. Perhaps they didn’t have any?

Lil Fella from OZ
December 28, 2013 10:07 pm

Text message Englass.

Alan Robertson
December 28, 2013 10:11 pm

Richard Keen says:
December 28, 2013 at 10:07 pm
Some years ago – at least 15 or 20, since I still remember it – our local school district (the largest in Colorado) advertised a hiring search for a middle school “Principle”. Perhaps they didn’t have any?
____________________
Maybe it wasn’t practicle.

Patrick
December 28, 2013 10:15 pm

If this originated in Nigeria we’d be calling scam. In any case, reads like a scam. I wonder how many will fall for it?

December 28, 2013 10:16 pm

It’s almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a real journal.
With apologies to Douglas Adams.

Hoser
December 28, 2013 10:19 pm

Hey, if one billion Indians speak English, then maybe they become the largest stockholders and decide spelling and grammar. For sure it would be hard to write in Hindi.
नया साल मुबारक हो
I have to trust Google translate on that one.
Happy New Year.

CRS, DrPH
December 28, 2013 10:28 pm

Hey, quit pickin’ on the Indians already!
In all honesty, a paper chronicling the ongoing trends of global cooling would probably get better treatment in this rag than in Scientific American or Science. If I had any practicle reearch, I’d consider a submittal….

Eugene WR Gallun
December 28, 2013 11:53 pm

Do you think they would publish my poetry?
Eugene WR Gallun

petermue
December 29, 2013 12:17 am

At least they wrote “105 $” correctly (*slobber*)… or did they mean 150 $?
I don’t know, but this ad is so ludicrous.

Oakwood
December 29, 2013 12:27 am

A good description of Ethical Issues includes:
“Data fabrication and falsification :
Data fabrication means the researcher did not actually do the study, but made up data. Data falsification means the researcher did the experiment, but then changed some of the data. Both of these practices make people distrust scientists. If the public is mistrustful of science then it will be less willing to provide funding support.”
But they don’t say whether encouraged or discouraged.

gopal panicker
December 29, 2013 12:45 am

yeah….English is a foreign language in india….i see all kinds of junk in the newspaper…a good one yesterday….Snowing in Nagaland…’ Temperature minus zero degrees’

Mark
December 29, 2013 1:05 am

Interesting that they give two email addresses on public webmail providers. But have their own domain for a website. They also appear to have mangled ₹ into $. So the fee is probably more like 1.69 USD, 1.81 CAD, 1.91 AUD, 2.08 NZD, 1.23 EUR, 1.03 GBP, 1.51 CHF, etc
On the other hand their address and fixed phone number do correspond to the same part of india.

Gareth Phillips
December 29, 2013 1:26 am

Love it! It started the day with a good laugh. I wonder if the people publishing it know a rather generous young Lady from Nigeria who has inherited millions, but needs help to get it out of the country. All she need is my bank details apparently. I wonder if she is interested in my research?

Duster
December 29, 2013 1:33 am

gopal panicker says:
December 29, 2013 at 12:45 am
yeah….English is a foreign language in india….i see all kinds of junk in the newspaper…a good one yesterday….Snowing in Nagaland…’ Temperature minus zero degrees’

The pages look legitimate enough. I suspect that some of the intended sense has fallen through cracks of translation.
In fact English is not a “foreign language” in India. Some of the best writers using English at present are of Indian descent and based in India. English is widely spoken – if occasionally somewhat ungrammatically as we would understand it – and is a required skill in the Indian military, science and engineering. There are 20 major constitutionally “scheduled languages” counting English, so English is and Indian language by law (see here: http://www.mapsofindia.com/culture/indian-languages.html for instance).
Each of the scheduled major languages, except English, Hindi and Sanskrit, is an “official” language for some chunk of the subcontinent and English has perforce become the “lingua Franca” for the subcontinent. It probably works because speakers of many of the other major languages still occupy large pieces of the country and historically have indulged in conquering the neighbors off and on. The social resistance to “legitimizing” an erstwhile conqueror’s language, when they still live next door must be immense. The English on the other hand are gone from India in any forceful capacity, though the Commonwealth lingers on. This makes them not much more than an historical foot note now, and they left behind a useful tool in their language that can be used without offering any extra legitimacy to some specific ethnicity.

Steve C
December 29, 2013 1:48 am

To be fair, English must be the worst choice ever for a lingua franca. Other languages have rules and exceptions; English seems to be almost 100% exceptions – IME even most native English-speakers mostly communicate outside the rules because the rules are so inscrutable.
The BBC did an interesting radio program a while back on “English as a Lingua Franca”, showing how “ELF” speakers informally generate rules among themselves which would never occur to a native speaker. Example: To me, information is just information, neither singular nor plural. But the programme mentioned that ELF speakers generally distinguish between “one info” (say, your name) and “many infos” (… and adddress, email, phone number), according to how they perceive the info(s?) under consideration. Fascinating stuff.
I always ask myself, “How well could I have said this in the author’s native tongue?” The answer is invariably humbling, though that still doesn’t stop me enjoying the often eccentric sound of the text that prompted the thought. I reckon they’ll get a few “articals”. 😉

David, UK
December 29, 2013 1:52 am

Who cares. Bin it and move on. Yawn.

Dodgy Geezer
December 29, 2013 2:00 am

Being a dodgy geezer myself, I understand the psychology which goes into these missives. Do NOT think that they are childish. They are, in fact, very carefully put together – spelling mistakes and all.
When you run a scam, you do not want highly intelligent people to bite. They may listen to you for a while, but they will not provide any stream of money, and you will be wasting your time. You don’t even want people of average intelligence – because half of those will cotton on to what you are doing once they have spent a little money.
What you want are completely unintelligent gullible people, or people who are so greedy that their desire overcomes their natural caution. These are the people who will give you their life savings and all the money set aside for their kid’s college fund.
To get these people, you bait your hook with a worm that is so obviously fake that only the stupidest persons will respond. That way you waste little time in negotiations and persuasion, and you can cut right to the essential part of the transaction – getting them to pay you money….

Steve
December 29, 2013 2:02 am

Steve C says:
December 29, 2013 at 1:48 am
To be fair, English must be the worst choice ever for a lingua franca. Other languages have rules and exceptions; English seems to be almost 100% exceptions – IME even most native English-speakers mostly communicate outside the rules because the rules are so inscrutable.
*********************************************
Steve, I teach English to university students in Thailand and the 2 answers to pesky grammar questions that you can’t immediately answer are:
1. It’s an exception to the rule and
2. It’s usage.
Re info and infos, in Thailand the common one is: a company has 167 staffs (obviously they’re talking about some government apartment). And articles completely confuses. I’m glad I’m a native speaker as I’d hate to learn it.

Greg
December 29, 2013 2:56 am

Patrick says: If this originated in Nigeria we’d be calling scam. In any case, reads like a scam. I wonder how many will fall for it?
As pay to publish goes it’s surprisingly cheap.
However, as has anyone ever heard of this “International Recognition” journal? I suspect not.
Since they can’t even find someone competent to proof read the flyer and don’t know enough about e-mail to use BCC on the address list, it does not give much hope for technical issues in peer review.
Call me again in ten years when you are “International Recognition” .

Txomin
December 29, 2013 2:58 am

These type of people do conferences too. It’s all a scam.

knr
December 29, 2013 3:45 am

Sadly give what a rubbish job the ‘leading journals’ do when it comes to making authors stick to the rules , using peer rather than pal review etc . Although it is easy to knock these guys given what they done, if your being honest you have to ask how much better the ‘lead journals’ actual are. Especially those that handing themselves over wholesale to ‘the cause ‘ and ‘noble ‘ cause corruption.

December 29, 2013 5:12 am

Hoser @ 10:19 pm
Tip: If you want a “belt and braces” solution to check that Google Translate is accurate, then use Bing Translator to convert the supplied text back into English.
नया साल मुबारक हो
http://www.bing.com/translator/
Happy new year

December 29, 2013 5:22 am

I don’t think I’ve seen this particular e-mail, although I get quite a few like it. Since I work for a university and have a .edu e-mail address, I get a lot of offers to publish my scholarly papers in prestigious journals for a nominal fee. Fortunately as the school’s locksmith, I am not under the same “publish or perish” pressure as the teaching staff.

Joe
December 29, 2013 5:47 am

So, if someone were to publish a bit of strongly pro-AGW reearch in this, what would be its chances of getting included in the next IPCC report?

PaulH
December 29, 2013 6:34 am

“With pleasure we invite yo to contribute…”
Yo! ;->

Steve from Rockwood
December 29, 2013 6:38 am

$150 for a PhD from the Orange Blossom University, followed by a series of articles on global warming submitted to these worthy journals at $105 a pop. I could have a government job in 3 years with the right CV for less than a couple of ‘g’s. Or maybe run Yahoo.

John A
December 29, 2013 7:22 am

If you want send it to Jeffrey Beall via http://scholarlyoa.com/ then I#m sure he’ll add it to the list of Open Access crap which is making Nature and Science look almost respectable by comparison

Robin Hewitt
December 29, 2013 7:53 am

I will certainly use practicle next time I wish to define a practical particle. It is just perfect, or should I say perficle?

December 29, 2013 7:55 am

This was released ahead of time by mistake. It should have been embargoed till April 1st.

Pamela Gray
December 29, 2013 8:00 am

This is the funny side of a serious problem. Even well-healed journals have been duped by fake articles.

David Ball
December 29, 2013 8:47 am

“Come see the Egress. 10¢.” – P.T. Barnum

Donald Mitchell
December 29, 2013 9:55 am

Among the many prejudices that I feel reveal more about the holders than the targets, I think that the prejudice against ALL CAPS is one of the funnier. I was delighted when I got my first model ASR-33 Teletype with keyboard and paper tape reader and punch. It made my first computer, an Interdata model 16, feasible for me. I was freed from servitude to the monstrous card punches and readers of the large machines. While the model 43 was much preferable to the 33, the availability of lower case letters in a 5×7 dot matrix may have actually decreased overall legibility of printed copy. While I did use the lower case in some communications that were intended solely for use by humans, I pretty well stuck to upper case for interchange with machines. Then, the ability to actually avoid printing with the wonderful first CRT terminals was a tremendous advance, but the 5×7 dot matrices still did little for the legibility of lower case letters.
Of course, current displays and printers done wonders for the legibility of text and I have even advanced to the point that I often use a font with proportional spacing for some communications intended solely for consumption by other humans, but communications intended strictly for use by machines, including interpreters and compilers, (and often notes to myself) use a mono-space font with usually more upper case characters than lower.
I must admit that I am usually more interested in what someone has in the information or ideas that someone has to communicate than how pretty they have managed to make the presentation. I probably even tend to weight my evaluation of the content if the care taken in the visual presentation seems large compared to that of the care taken in the formulation of the content.

dmacleo
December 29, 2013 10:10 am

am I the only one who expected to see irregardless buried in there somewhere? 🙂

Brian H
December 29, 2013 11:08 am

Greg says:
December 29, 2013 at 2:56 am

Since they can’t even find someone competent to proof read the flyer

Read the Dodge Geez’ comment above. The lousy grammar is deliberate, a filter to target only the suckeriest of suckers, willing to go at least a few rounds of pre-pay publicating.

December 29, 2013 11:10 am

Steve C says:
December 29, 2013 at 1:48 am
To be fair, English must be the worst choice ever for a lingua franca. Other languages have rules and exceptions; English seems to be almost 100% exceptions – IME even most native English-speakers mostly communicate outside the rules because the rules are so inscrutable.

Sorry, that’s BS. Multiple misspellings of the same word is just ignorance and laziness.
Most native English speakers communicate outside the rules because they’re lazy (using “there’s” or “here’s” when they should be using “there are” or “here are”, for example)

December 29, 2013 11:54 am

Indians are masters at business deals. Collect money from “contributors” and sell online with low overhead by publish digitally. The peer reviewers may actually be blind.

Scarface
December 29, 2013 12:39 pm

Phil Jones once wrote:
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
Maybe this is their redefinition of peer-review literature? It surely passes the test of sloppiness and money-driven motives which are so indissoluble connected to most agw-science.

Zeke
December 29, 2013 12:46 pm

There are a lot of new journals and societies for publishing alternative hypotheses. However:
1. Alternative science is such a freak show. To hear any of these movements criticize “mainstream science” for not upholding or using scientific standards is beyond incredible irony. They are adept at pointing to the speck in someone else’s eye, and psychoanalyze your resistance to “truth.”
2. Many of the alternative science sites, if you look carefully at their mission/about statements, are political advocacy groups for “sustainability” and “the problems of world governance.” So it is not so “alternative” after all.

Jimbo
December 29, 2013 2:46 pm

Why do they use Yahoo mail and Gmail when they have a website?

Chris R.
December 30, 2013 2:49 pm

To Steve C.:
English was once memorably described thusly:

English is the result of the attempts by the Norman men-at-arms
to make dates with the Saxon barmaids after the battle of Hastings,
and, as a language, no more legitimate than any of the other
products of said unions.

This was stated by the late science fiction author H. Beam Piper.

John@EF
December 30, 2013 9:27 pm

I cannot wait for the published peer-reviewed study proving that one-half of the US warming record is specious.

Tim Clark
December 31, 2013 7:40 am

SEEMS FAIRLY PRACTICLE TO ME.