Really from Canada?
For various reasons, Canada is currently a hot location for setting up predatory publishers.
My list of questionable publishers includes these with ties to Canada:
- A M Publishers
- Bioscience Research and Educational Institute
- Canadian Center of Science and Education
- CSCanada
- eCanadian Journals
- Growing Science Publishing Company
- LifeScience Global
- Sciedu Press
Here I would like to focus on the Growing Science Publishing Company. It claims to be based in Waterloo, Ontario, and it may have an office there — I can’t tell. Several times I have tried calling the contact they list, a “Linda Smith,” but she never answers. The telephone number is listed as “001-519-590-0980.”
The publisher publishes four journals, and their titles appear on its home page this way:
Many of the same people appear on the four editorial boards, and the vast majority of the board members are from Iran. Thus, I think this is really some type of Iranian operation.
Could they be twins?
I wonder if the editorial boards really exist. Here they have the same person pictured twice.
The layout of the individual articles is made to resemble articles published by a major publisher:
One of their articles. Look familiar?
There is no mention of author fees on the site, and it is possible that the publisher does not charge at this time.
It’s usually easy for me to find plagiarism among a predatory publisher’s journals, but I didn’t find any here.
The publisher doesn’t seem to understand the difference between being listed, being indexed, and being cataloged. When the publisher or its journals are listed in a directory, this is a listing. When individual articles are indexed/abstracted, this is indexing/abstracting. Library catalogs include metadata for individual journals, not generally for articles.
The site boasts,
Growing Science currently publishes two [sic] open access, peer-reviewed journals and they are included in one or more of the leading abstracting and indexing databases, including ProQuest, Google Schoolar, Ulriches’ web [sic], Socolar, Genamics, ISC, Index Copernicus, Open J-Gate, DOAJ, EBSCO, Microsoft Academic search, Libraries of various well-known universities such as MIT, MIT, [sic] Washington State, GeorgeTown [sic], Strathclyde, Tohoku, Indiana, North Dakota, York, Osaka, NovaNet, and Tamkang. Growing Science has been also a member of CrossRef, the scholarly DOI linking organization.
The tag line at the top of this publisher’s home page is, “Publishers of Distinguished Academic, Scientific, and Professional Journals.” This makes for a worthy goal, but it does not reflect the current state of affairs at Growing Science.
Any plausible reasons why Canada would be such a hotbed for predatory publishers?
Among the issues raised in this section, faulty address along with faulty telephone number sounds bad however the duplicate editor photo might be topographical error; secondly format of the article chosen by the OA journal might resemble the some big journals formats but that does not suffice for the predatory activity.
if your paper is accepted in the journals of this publisher, you should pay money, but they didn’t state that in their site…
all of these journals are fake, look at the list of papers, you can find more than three paper from the same author in one issue, it seems that these authors should be a prominent scholar in their field!!!
at the other hand, many of Iranian faculty member use these journals to promote their position…
they ruined the science, not growing it….