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The Coltharp Institute is a conference organizer and scholarly publisher that recently launched with nine open-access journals, each with a broad scope already well-covered by many existing scholarly journals. 

Coltharp’s logo. It might look good on a T-shirt or a coffee mug.

A spam email from the “institute” and forwarded to me gave this address for the institute:

6051 N. Ocean Dr.
Apt 506
Hollywood, FL 33019

The email was signed:

Dr. Jean Gordon
Executive Director
Coltharp Institute

The building at 6051 N. Ocean Dr. is a large apartment/condo tower located on the beach. I have never heard of Dr. Gordon — it’s possible this name is contrived.

None of the journals lists an editorial board and none has published any articles yet. It appears that the journals are set up only to publish the papers presented at Coltharp’s conferences.

Their first conference is scheduled to take place in Nashville, Tennessee from December 18th-20th, 2014, at the Bridgestone Arena.

Eight of Coltharp’s nine “catch all” journals.

This is a mysterious startup, and there is likely little benefit to participating in its conferences or submitting to its journals. I think scholars interested in publishing their research in these disciplines should seek out established (and more transparent) scholarly societies and established publishers. Your work would be invisible here.

Therefore, I recommend against attending conferences organized by the Coltharp Institute and against submitting papers to its journals.

Appendix

Coltharp Journals as of 2014-08-29:

  1.  Journal of Applied Business Research
  2. Journal of Business Education
  3. Journal of Business Management
  4. Journal of College Teaching
  5. Journal of Economics
  6. Journal of Education Research
  7. Journal of Healthcare
  8. Journal of Information Systems
  9. Journal of International Business

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2014 at 9:00 AM and is filed under Scholarly Open-Access Publishers, spam email. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.