Part of the International Scholarly Research Network's home page.
The International Scholarly Research Network (ISRN) is not really a network. Instead, it’s a publisher, or more precisely, a publisher’s imprint. ISRN is a brand of Hindawi Publishing Corporation based in Cairo, Egypt.
Hindawi publishes 86 titles under this brand, and the titles all begin with the initialism ISRN. Alphabetically, the first is ISRN Agronomy, and the last is ISRN Zoology. The journals all fall into the areas of science, technology and medicine.
This imprint is not on my list (above) of questionable publishers, but I am monitoring its progress. ISRN uses the gold open-access model of financing scholarly publishing. That is, it charges authors upon acceptance of an article. The normal fee for ISRN titles is US $500 per article, but some of the titles temporarily have no fees, and the publisher claims to waive fees for authors from certain developing countries.
The journals do not have editors. Instead, they have unusually large editorial boards, with many titles having as many as two hundred members or more, from around the world. Submissions are sent to two of the editorial board members who quickly review the paper and reply to Hindawi with their comments. Some unknown person at Hindawi then makes the final decision on whether to accept or reject the paper, or to return it to the author for revision.
Large editorial boards also help recruit article submissions; in this model the board members effectively function as salesmen for the journal, as the publisher makes its money not from subscriptions but from author fees.
The coverage of the journal titles is broad. Two examples are ISRN Botany and ISRN Civil Engineering. Broad journal coverage is typical of publishers that use the author-pays model. The broader the coverage a journal has, the more papers fall within its scope, generating more submissions and making more money for the publisher.
The journals then lack focus; they become loosely-connected anthologies, incoherent and desultory. Lacking editors-in-chief, they are faceless components of scholarly communication.
I will continue to monitor the progress of Hindawi’s International Scholarly Research Network brand.
Hi many thanks for your valuable guidance. Would you please prvide me the Imavt Factor of this Journal as well (mrmaleki@ujiroft.ac.ir)
very nice to have some independent information regarding this and other publishers… Thanks!
I’ve just been contacted by these guys and asked to be on the editorial board for a new journal – ISRN physiology. After reading your post I’m pretty wary – should I be? Have you managed to dig up anything else about these journals? Thanks in advance…
Yes, please see the blog post from today.
Fantastic – thanks Jeffrey. By the way – your blog is fantastic! Really valuable stuff.
I’ve been asked to write one of their spotlight articles.
They say: “The Article Processing Charges required by ISRN Materials Science will be waived for all Spotlight Articles. Moreover, authors will be provided with an honorarium of $1,000 upon the completion of their Spotlight Article as a sign of appreciation for their efforts.”
If they are outlaying, this sounds like an attempt to jump clear from the ruck of low-grade OA publishers, it seems to me. Hindawi are in my mind tarred with the same brush as many OA journals on your black list, and I am wondering ‘is that fair?’ Am I being biased towards the old school publishers? I’m having trouble deciding whether to take it up. Very hard to find info on the journal. I do recognize some names on the editorial board, though none I’d say were really eminent.
based on your comment: “The broader the coverage a journal has, the more papers fall within its scope, generating more submissions and making more money for the publisher.”, what do you think of PLOS One? the scope can not be broader and I do not see any negative publicity about it.
There’s plenty of criticism of Plos One. Perhaps you need to look harder. To paraphrase one recent comment, Plos One is a repository masquerading as a journal. What separates Plos One from the predators is that Plos One has good intentions; the predators do not.
“What separates Plos One from the predators is that Plos One has good intentions; the predators do not.”
this is really a subjective opinion.
For example, I am the co-owner of InTech OA publisher (which is on your list), and I am pretty sure that we do not have any “bad” intentions. After all, two of us were scientists. I appreciate your work and energy you invest in clarifying the area of OA publishing, but the line between “good and bad guys” is so not clarified. At the end, it is based on someones subjective opinion, in this case of yours. We tried many times to talk with you openly, but without any success.
Aren’t all opinions subjective? Many others have criticized InTech as well, for example,
http://poynder.blogspot.com/2011/10/oa-interviews-intechs-nicola-rylett.html
“Aren’t all opinions subjective?” – of course they are, and once again I really appreciate your opinion, but your list has too important impact to be based on opinions. I can not seriously comment your work and the list based on my opinion. I commented the fact that you are not implying the same “rules” to all, you are filtering them, which is not right and is not working toward everybody’s goal to explain misunderstandings about open access publishing.
In scientific world (which I am part of) opinions do not matter, but arguments and facts.