Kowsar is an
STM publishing company which was founded in 2002 by S.M. Miri and Seyed-Moayed Alavian. Kowsar journals have been
peer review
Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work (peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review ...
ed and are published
open access
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...
under a
Creative Commons Attribution License
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyric ...
Non Commercial 4.0. The company is a member of the
Committee on Publication Ethics
The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) is a nonprofit organization whose stated mission is to define best practice in the ethics of scholarly publishing and to assist editors and publishers to achieve this.
Mission
COPE educates and su ...
.
The publisher has been included in several studies of predatory journals, and was included on ''
Beall's List
Beall's List was a prominent list of predatory open-access publishers that was maintained by University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall on his blog ''Scholarly Open Access''. The list aimed to document open-access publishers who did not perf ...
'' prior to its shutdown in 2017. In 2018,
PubMed Central
PubMed Central (PMC) is a free digital repository that archives open access full-text scholarly articles that have been published in biomedical and life sciences journals. As one of the major research databases developed by the National Center f ...
conducted a re-evaluation of 16 Kowsar journals indexed in the database; 14 were found to "no longer satisfy PMC's Scientific Quality Standard" and were accordingly delisted.
Some of its journals, like ''Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine'', incorrectly claimed to be included in the