Nova Publishers

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The neutrality of this article is disputed.
Please see the discussion on the talk page.(December 2007)
Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved.

Nova Publishers is a publishing house based in New York. Frank Columbus is the current editor-in-chief.

1 Areas of publishing
2 Concerns
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Areas of publishing

Nova's primary publishing focus is on geopolitics, with many published works on the politics and economies of Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa. Their Nova Science division publishes scientific research books in the fields of physics and medical research. Nova currently publishes 78 journal titles in disparate areas^[1].

[edit] Concerns

Concerns have been raised about Nova's practice of reprinting content such as out-of-copyright books in their journals as new articles.^[2] Concerns have also been raised about Nova's policies for soliciting contributions, which is considered rather unusual, at least by several physicists who have received email requests for contributions:^[3]

The decision to accept or decline a contribution is given in less than 7 days and the contributing author is required to include the keyword "Abstract" in the subject of the email when they submit their contribution, which suggests that the editor is interested more in quantity rather than quality; both because of the requirement for the keyword in the email subject and because of the fact that in the scientific world a delay of several weeks or even months is normal to have a contribution checked for quality.
The decision to accept or decline an article is based on the abstract; the article itself is not submitted for peer review.
There is an emphasis on the length of the article; it must be at least 5,000 words long. The word count includes bibliographic references but not other information normally considered critical to an article’s scientific value such as mathematical formulas, diagrams and tables. In general, the longer the paper the better. Submissions of less than 5,000 words (references are included in the word count) will be returned.^[3]

In spite of these issues, scientists^[who?] from top academic institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, and UCSD have published their work through this publisher, and Nova's publications are held by some major libraries^{[citation needed]}.