“To blindly peer review, where no man has peer reviewed before.”
IJSAT, the International Journal of Science and Advanced Technology, is engaging in a spam email campaign to solicit manuscripts, and it offers a bonus for authors: quick publication.
And we mean really quick. A spam email copied below promises publication in four days from submission (August 27 to August 31). Perhaps aptly, the banner on the journal’s website states, “Blindly Peer Review.”
We know that the increasing number of open-access publishers has heated up the competition among them. This journal’s marketing gimmick is to offer really, really, fast “peer review.” The market is finding clever new ways to quickly separate authors and funders from their money.
This journal has a CC BY logo on its main page, yet on another page it states it requires authors to sign over copyright to the publisher.
A copy of one of their spam emails.
We are extremely suspicious of a peer review process that is completed in only a few days.
There is no ‘University of Ma Chung’ in Indonesia..
Why? You think reviewers spend weeks over an article? maybe days? I am experienced in the matter. No more than an hour during which many of them do not exercise academic standards but ego verification.
I don’t quite agree with your ‘ego verification’ point (depending on how you define ‘many’), but looking at my own experience as a reviewer, it usually indeed takes me a couple of hours at most to review a paper. Furthermore, it tends to be done late at night, just before or just after the deadline, no matter whether the editor gave me two days or two months. So for me it would generally be no problem if I got only a few days to hand in a review. Still, I guess it’s pretty unusual for journals to request such a fast turnaround. And the two days include the time that it’s on the editor’s desk.