ISRN Oceanography, one of 106 ISRN journals.
Cairo-based Hindawi Publishing Corporation is apparently launching a new strategy to invigorate its ISRN (International Scholarly Research Network) brand. The strategy involves paying scholars to write papers to help make the brand’s 106 journals more attractive to other potential authors.
Normally, ISRN operates using the author-pays model, charging authors upon acceptance of their articles. These “article processing charges” can cost $1,000 or more.
Hindawi is currently undertaking a spam campaign to solicit articles for the ISRN journals. In emails sent to researchers, ISRN offers to pay $1,000 for each accepted article.
Interestingly, the articles ISRN seeks are review articles with 100-300 citations and at least 10,000 words. They call these “spotlight articles.”
One of these solicitations went to Dr. Colin D. MacLeod, an Honourary Research Fellow at a Scottish University.
The email he received is here. [PDF]
Dr. MacLeod’s analysis of the offer is spot-on:
It turns out that the journal in question is in the process of being launched and as yet has no articles listed on its home pages. This makes me wonder whether this is a new twist on the standard commercial open publishing operation. By inviting, and indeed paying for, review articles from people who are well known (and possibly even respected – whether I am respected in my field or not is up to others to judge!), they can quickly gain a level of acceptability, something that I presume is becoming ever more difficult as more and more people become aware of how much of a scam these journals can be. It might also ensure that the articles are well written, relevant, and therefore, well cited, helping to provide a higher impact factor.
Thus, it would seem that this would be one way for a OA publisher to gain a level of initial respectability in a given field for a relatively low initial output in comparison to the potential returns. Indeed, if it continued this policy, and had one well cited, well written, paid for review article in each ‘issue’, it would be a relatively small outlay that could effectively buy respectability and citations – after all reviews tend to be particularly heavily cited – that would be more than covered by the page charges to every other author within that issue.
Potentially, it would also encourage others to submit manuscripts within the reviewed field as it is common to look at where previous papers on the same subject have been published when trying to decide where to publish your own.
Dr. MacLeod notes that Hindawi did not specify the topic of the proposed article or whether he could choose the topic.
The market is becoming saturated with gold open-access publishers. Hindawi is obviously feeling this competition and cleverly wants to take action to increase its article submissions and, therefore, its income.
This is a unique twist on the author pays model, one we will monitor to gauge its success.
Appendix:
Journals have always invited contributions for first issues etc. The only difference here is they are paying.
I have mixed feelings about this. Quite reputable book publishers, including university presses, might start a new book series by commissioning a leading scholar to write an initial book for the series. I don’t think anyone would find this an especially reprehensible or ethically dubious tactic. So, why are we queasy when the same approach is used to launch a new journal? Is it just because journal publishers typically do not pay authors anything, whereas book publishers do? Is it ethically important to uphold that tradition and the difference between journal and book publishing? If so, why?
[...] Second, and more importantly, a community of informed reciprocity requires that a large community be built quickly in order to take advantage of the social network effects. Initially, when the community is small, it may be very difficult to enlist a competent member-reviewer for a submitted manuscript. PeerJ will need to go out to the rest of the author community for review help, and this may be difficult to do if the quality of the submitted manuscripts are poor. The competition amongst open access journals is getting intense, with one publisher announcing that it will pay prominent authors to write review papers for them (with lo…. [...]
I would like to see a clear statement that the author had been commissioned and paid by the journal – that could go in the acknowledgements // conflict of interest // funding section often found at the end of articles. I don’t see the practice as terribly worrisome, as long as there is transparency.
[...] to publish review articles to earn $1000 by boosting the journal brands. Jeffrey Beall has the story at Scholarly Open Access, which is an interesting blog that also highlights what he alleges to be [...]
[...] first is the news from Hindawi that, as part of launching ISRN Oceanography, they will begin paying authors t…. The articles are being positioned as solo-author reviews called “Spotlight Articles,” [...]