Don’t even think about publishing here.
The gold rush continues — gold open-access, that is. This blog post briefly describes a brand-new publisher we recently discovered. It has serious problems. Let me explain.
World Science Research Journals (WSR Journals). Hailing from Delta State, Nigeria, this brand new publisher is launching with five journals, none of which has any content (or editorial board) yet.
Even though it hasn’t published any articles yet, this publisher already has a plagiarism problem. It has lifted professional pictures from the open internet to illustrate the site, pictures we suspect are copyrighted. Second, it uses text from Wikipedia, from author Alma Swan, and from Elsevier, all without attribution. In fact, the pages with lifted text bear a copyright statement. The publisher is claiming copyright on others’ work.
The journal has a page bemoaning the need to charge authors article processing fees, but it doesn’t state what the fees will be. The text on the page is copied from another publisher.
Say what? (see transcription below)
Our favorite part of the site is its FAQ page, where it says this:
Frequestly Ask Questions
Every now and then, we are being constantly and repeatedly bombarded with series of questions by all manners of researchers and scholars across the scientific community. And so, we decided to compile a list of frequently asked questions with a view to easing the whole process. It is our plan to add to this list where necessary.
That first line is both illogical and completely false. Here are the five journals this outfit hopes to publish:
- World Journal of Agricultural Sciences
- World Journal of Biochemistry and Biotechnology
- World Journal of Biology and Biological Sciences
- World Journal of Medicine and Medical Science Research
- World Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmacology
We learned of this publisher from a forwarded spam email message originally sent out by Igho Itedjere, an editorial assistant. Uniquely, this publisher claims to be “owned and managed by African-American scholars and institutions,” yet none of these are named. We find pretty much everything on this publisher’s site to be either copied or a complete lie.
The publisher Lists two addresses, one in Albany, New York, and one in Lagos, Nigeria. The domain-name registration shows a Delta State, Nigeria location.
