Scientific Research Publishing

Scientific Research Publishing
Status Active
Founded 2007
Founder Huaibei Zhou[1]
Headquarters location Wuhan, China
Distribution Worldwide
Key people Huaibei Zhou[1]
Publication types Academic journals and books
Nonfiction topics Life sciences, economics, chemistry, computer science, environmental sciences, engineering, medicine, physics, mathematics, social sciences
Number of employees About 160
Official website www.scirp.org

Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP) is an academic publisher of peer-reviewed open-access electronic journals, conference proceedings, and scientific anthologies.[2] As of December 2014, it offers 244[3] English language open access journals in the areas of science, technology, business, economy, and medicine. Its principal place of business is in Wuhan, China.[1]

The company has been accused of being a predatory open access publisher and of abusing bulk email.[2]

Open access type

According to its website, SCIRP publishes fee-based open-access journals (Gold OA). Payments are incurred per article published. Authors are permitted to archive their work (Green OA). Preprint, postprint, and the publisher's PDF version may be used.[4] According to the society's website, journals published are fully open access, with reuse rights based on CC-BY or CC BY-NC.[1] All of its journals are archived by PORTICO.[5]

History

SCIRP was set up by a group of friends from the United States and from China to promote exchange between scholars.[6] It was founded by Huaibei (Barry) Zhou and a few other scholars. The company has several private owners and is a registered corporation in the state of Delaware (United States) since 2007.[1][7] SCIRP is part of a publishing group together with Hans Publishers (Chinese language scholarly open access journals) and Open Access Library (multifunctional: search engine, index of external open access articles, repository, and mega journal).[8][3]

Controversies

SCIRP generated controversy in 2010 when it was found that its journals duplicated papers which had already been published elsewhere, without notification of or permission from the original author and of the copyright holder.[9] Several of these publications have subsequently been retracted.[10] Some of the journals had listed academics on their editorial boards without their permission or even knowledge, sometimes in fields very different from their own.[6] In 2012, one of its journals, Advances in Pure Mathematics, accepted a paper written by a random text generator. The paper was not published, but only due to its author's unwillingness to pay the publication fee.[11] The company has also been noted for the many unsolicited bulk emails it sends to academics about its journals.[2][6]

The company has been included in a list of questionable open access publishers,[12][13] according to Jeffrey Beall's criteria.[14] Beall states that "This publisher exists for two reasons. First, it exists to exploit the author-pays Open Access model to generate revenue, and second, it serves as an easy place for foreign (chiefly Chinese) authors to publish overseas and increase their academic status." He acknowledges that its fees are relatively low, describing this as "a strategy that increases article submissions," and that "it has attracted some quality article submissions. Nevertheless, it is really a vanity press."[2]

Beall points out that "Scientific Research Publishing ... like many questionable open-access publishers, ... is registered in Delaware" and therefore wonders "if the firm reports its income".[15]

Further controversy was generated by a mass resignation of the editorial board of one of the company's journals, Advances in Anthropology, in 2014. According to the former editor-in-chief, Fatimah Jackson, it was motivated by failures to include the editorial board in the journal's review process, and by "consistent and flagrant unethical breaches by the editorial staff in China", for whom publishing the journal "was only about making money." According to Beall, this was the first mass-resignation from an open-access journal.[16]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 "AboutUs". SCIRP. Retrieved 2015-01-04.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Beall, Jeffrey (April 2012). "Five Scholarly Open Access Publishers". The Charleston Advisor 13 (4): 5–10. doi:10.5260/chara.13.4.5.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Jeffrey Beall (2014-12-16). "The Chinese Publisher SCIRP (Scientific Research Publishing): A Publishing Empire Built on Junk Science". Retrieved 2015-01-08.
  4. ↑ "Scientific Research Publishing". SHERPA. Retrieved 2013-05-28.
  5. ↑ "Who Participates in Portico?". PORTICO. Retrieved 2014-09-25.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Sanderson, Katharine (2010). "Two new journals copy the old". Nature 463 (7278): 148. doi:10.1038/463148a. PMID 20075892.
  7. ↑ "SCIRP-FAQ: How is SCIRP organized? What are its imprints?". SCIRP. 2014. Retrieved 2015-01-13.
  8. ↑ "SCIRP-FAQ: Who are the companies in the publishing group together with SCIRP?". Scientific Research Publishing. 2014. Retrieved 2015-01-08.
  9. ↑ Abrahams, Marc (2009-12-22). "Strange academic journals: Scam?". Improbable Research. Retrieved 2015-01-13.
  10. ↑ Oransky, Ivan (2012-05-25). "Three more retractions for Vietnamese physicists who plagiarized a plagiarized paper". Retraction Watch. Retrieved 2015-01-13.
  11. ↑ Doctorow, Cory (October 19, 2012). "Math journal accepts computer-generated nonsense paper". BoingBoing.
  12. ↑ Beall, Jeffrey (2014). "List of Predatory Publishers 2014". Retrieved 2014-04-21.
  13. ↑ Beall, Jeffrey (2014). "Beall's list of potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers". Retrieved 2014-04-21.
  14. ↑ Beall, Jeffrey (2009-12-01). "Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access Publishers (2nd edition)". Retrieved 2013-03-03.
  15. ↑ Beall, Jeffrey (2014-07-31). "Is Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP) Publishing Pseudo-Science?". Retrieved 2015-01-08.
  16. ↑ Beall, Jeffrey (2014-10-02). "An Editorial Board Mass-Resignation — from an Open-Access Journal". Scholarly Open Access. Retrieved 2015-01-08.

External links