There are a number of things I want to write about, but this post involves something I didn't. In September, I was informed that I was listed as the editor-in-chief of a journal that I had never heard of: the " EON International Journal of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences." I sent an e-mail to the journal telling them to remove my name, but got no response, so I sent a letter to the mailing address listed. That letter was returned marked "Return to sender/Attempted--Not known/Unable to forward." I couldn't think of anything else to do, and more or less forgot about it until I got an e-mail from someone who had a paper accepted by the journal (the acceptance letter was sent under my name) and was told that it would be published online by November 15, but when she went to see she found their website was no longer operating. She wrote to the publisher's e-mail and got no response, so she was asking me if I knew what was going on.
The author sent a copy of the acceptance letter. It had two reviews, one marked "internal reviewer" and one "external reviewer." I'm not sure that there actually were any reviewers: both of the reports were generic and didn't mention anything specific about the content of the paper. There was also an "editor's scorecard," which had 0-10 ratings on qualities including "use of commas, semicolons." And then the important thing: payment instructions. The fee was $200, payable by credit card or by wiring the money to someone in Bangladesh. There was also this note "The payment is to be sent to Bangladesh as we are currently working on donation of a project related to an Autism NGO situated in Bangladesh. The journal is solely published from Editorial office of Wilmington, Delaware, USA."
So it seems that everything about this journal was fake, except that presumably they really did take the authors' money. Unfortunately, there's nothing to prevent them from starting again under a new name.
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