A publisher to avoid.
In late 2012, I was the victim of criminal impersonation. Someone sent out emails that looked like they were from me, asking for money to remove a publisher from my list. The technique they used is called email spoofing.
British journalist Richard Poynder recently wrote a blog post about the case, a blog post that contains an interview with Egyptian national Aly Ashry, who runs Ashdin Publishing in Belgium. Ashdin is listed on my list of predatory publishers, a listing I stand by and confirm.
In the blog post/interview, Mr. Aly states,
There is no plagiarism or self-plagiarism in any of our journals. All Ashdin articles are original, and it is easy for our editors and reviewers to detect plagiarism and reject any article containing it. Each accepted article will have been passed by 2 reviewers and 2 editors before it is accepted.
This statement is false.
The article “Gaseous Pollutants Formation and Their Harmful Effects on Health and Environment” by Yousef S. H. Najjar and published in the Ashdin journal Innovative Energy Policies, volume 1 (2011). doi:10.4303/iep/E101203 contains significant plagiarism.
The article contains this passage immediately after the abstract (p. [1]):
The plagiarized text.
Unfortunately, this text is taken verbatim from page 37 of the textbook Thermodynamics: An Engineering Approach, 4th ed., 2002, by Yunus A. Cengel and Michael Boles. ISBN 9780072549041.
The original text.
The citations in the passage in the article do not refer to the book but to other sources and are therefore false. In my opinion, this article should be retracted. Ashdin’s other journals contain additional examples of plagiarism. I recommend that scholars do not serve on Ashdin Publishing’s editorial boards, and I recommend that they not submit articles to the publisher.
Actually, it’s not very difficult to catch plagiarism and self-plagiarism in these journals. Regarding Ashdin Publishing, just compare abstracts for:
J.H Diaz (2008). J. La. State Med. Soc. 160, 333-342
(PMID: 19283982)
and:
J.H. Diaz (2010). Journal of Neuroparasitology, 1, N100503 1:14
(doi: 10.4303/jnp/N100503)
The former article is a review based on a MEDLINE search for the 1966-1998 period, and the latter on the period 1966-1999. Obviously, the review published by Ashdin in 2010 missed to quote the 2008 paper…
By the way, I noted that many OA publishers now require the readers to create a personal account before accessing the journal issues (not applicable to Ashdin. Not yet). Looks like to me as an attempt to avoid data-mining bots, which could, for example, check for all abstracts against eTBLAST or similar engines.
Erratum: the reviews I cited analyze articles in periods 1966-2008 and 1966-2009, respectively. Sorry.
Before proceeding to comment the text to be plagiarism one has to see the citataions the author has used. Those papaers had cited the original boo or not. If the had not cited the boo then it might be said they (papers in citation) are plagriased rather this paper because the author has cited from the papers. Yes one thing is the author might have not seen the original book than it might not be labelled as plagriased
First, if you copy someone else’s work, and you don’t use quotation marks, that’s plagiarism. In this case, the author copied several paragraphs word-for-word without quotation marks and without citing the work. He did include citations, but they were to different works. This is a clear case of plagiarism, without question.
Dear Jeffry
I think big firms like Google must step in detecting similarity index and compute this ratio for all published articles and report mean and standard deviation of similarity index for all publishers.
I am guessing the process of judging about the quality of papers published by a publisher could be easier if we had mean and standard deviation of similarity index for every publisher.
Presently, people like you must spend significant amount of time checking papers to detect such cases. If such method existed, we could easily make a judgement about them and your task will become easier too.
I believe you have a good communication with most US based firms and could inform them about my suggestion.
Best
Naser