Gone but not forgotten.
The publisher EUROJOURNALS has apparently decided to change its publishing model from open access to toll access. This Seychelles-based publisher — which is included on my list of predatory publishers — has removed most all of its content from the open internet. The publisher’s website is currently a mess, and looking at it, one gets the sense that there are big changes taking place. At one time, the publisher published approximately 33 open-access journals. Now, we can find a web presence for only ten of those journals, but the links to the individual articles belonging to the ten journals are all dead. For the remaining 23 journals, we cannot find any current web presence at all, meaning that all their content may be lost as well. [See the end of this blog post for the two lists of journals.]
Swedish librarian Pieta Eklund first alerted me to this change in EUROJOURNALS’ publishing model. She received an inquiry from a university student trying to find an article published in one of the EUROJOURNALS journals. The student contacted the publisher and received this reply:
Dear Author,
Thank you for your enquiry regarding your article in IRJFE.
IRJFE [International Research Journal of Finance and Economics] is separated from the Open access Journals. And is published independently. Please be noted that your paper has not disappeared, it will still be available through Econlit and EBSCO.
We had to stop open access policy because this has damaged our reputation through plagiarism. By no means this new policy means that the articles are now erased. they still exist, are published in print format, and are available in softcopy as well through EBSCO.
Thanking You
Sincerely
Editorial Team
I looked for these journals in EBSCO’s Econlit and Academic Search Premier databases and only found one title there: European Journal of Scientific Research. Will the others appear as promised?
Discussion questions: What exactly does the publisher mean when he says “damaged our reputation through plagiarism”? It is possible that all the plagiarism present in the publisher’s journals invited many Digital Millennium Copyright Act take down notices, causing the publisher to give up on open access? Does this mean that all the plagiarized articles will now be hosted (i.e. published) by EBSCO? Is this evidence that OA leads to an increase in author misconduct?
Analysis: All the researchers who paid $400 or more to have their work made open access in this publisher’s journals are not getting what they paid for. It is evident that some publishers that use the gold open-access model will not publish their content freely online forever. Scholars should avoid the risk of publishing their research with questionable publishers and should publish in only the highest quality venues.
List 1: EUROJOURNALS journals that still have a web presence but the links to all the articles do not work.
- American Journal of Scientific Research
- European Journal of Economics, Finance and Administrative Sciences
- European Journal of Scientific Research [In EBSCO]
- International Bulletin of Business Administration
- International Research Journal of Finance and Economics
- Journal of Chinese Economics and Finance
- Journal of Financial Markets Research
- Journal of Money, Investment and Banking
- Journal of Risk and Diversification
- Middle Eastern Finance and Economics
List 2: EUROJOURNALS journals for which we can no longer find any web presence:
- Advances in Horticulture
- Advances in Molecular Sciences
- Bulletin of Gender Studies
- Bulletin of Youth Development
- European Journal of Social Sciences
- Global Social Science Review
- Intelligence and Security Review
- International Journal of African Studies
- International Journal of Conflict Studies
- International Journal of Education of Developing Areas
- International Journal of Emergency, Disaster and Humanitarian Studies
- International Journal of Industrial Electronics and Embedded Control
- International Journal of Justice Studies and Policy
- International Journal of Soft Computing Applications
- International Journal of Urban Studies and Human Ecology
- International Review of Democracy and Security
- International Review of Forensic and Justice Studies
- International Review of Health and Safety Issues
- International Review of Science, Technology and Development
Hat tip: Pieta Eklund
It is terrible indeed. I, myself, faced problems with such journals.
I do not want to write further.at this time.
Jeff, Is this a ‘growing pain’ of the OA field? Fake OA journals publish plagiarized crap, and then get hit with takedown notices. Trying to cut their losses, they switch to toll access, destroying their one sure way of making money. As a toll access journal, they are not different (in terms of business model) from the several other genuine ones, rendering the fake ones out of business. The one downside to this is the loss of reputation for OA as a viable publishing model.
I was able to find some of the journals with access to full text pdf or at least their contents through Internet Archives, but it is only a partial list.
http://web.archive.org/web/20120724003324/http://www.europeanjournalofsocialsciences.com/ejss_issues.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20120716043520/http://www.journalofmoneyinvestmentandbanking.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20120724003259/http://www.europeanjournalofscientificresearch.com/ejsr_issues.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20120719083529/http://www.middleeasterneconomicsandfinance.com/mefe_issues.htm
http://web.archive.org/liveweb/http://www.americanjournalofscientificresearch.com
http://web.archive.org/web/20120603201233/http://www.internationalresearchjournaloffinanceandeconomics.com/irjfe_issues.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20120618145331/http://www.middleeasterneconomicsandfinance.com/mefe_issues.htm
It’s not just the scammers, BE Press went “closed access” and now MANY authors are pissed off, e.g., http://www.digitopoly.org/2012/01/26/berkeley-electronic-press-closes-up-journals/