Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP) is a
predatory
Predation is a biological interaction where one organism, the predator, kills and eats another organism, its prey. It is one of a family of common feeding behaviours that includes parasitism and micropredation (which usually do not kill th ...
academic publisher
Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally publ ...
of
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 ...
electronic journal
An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and d ...
s,
conference proceedings
In academia and librarianship, conference proceedings is a collection of academic papers published in the context of an academic conference or workshop. Conference proceedings typically contain the contributions made by researchers at the conferen ...
, and scientific
anthologies
In book publishing
Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed work ...
that are considered to be of questionable quality.
[ , it offered 244 English-language open-access journals in the areas of science, technology, business, economy, and medicine.]
The company has been accused of using email spam
Email spam, also referred to as junk email, spam mail, or simply spam, is unsolicited messages sent in bulk by email (spamming).
The name comes from a Monty Python sketch in which the name of the canned pork product Spam is ubiquitous, unavoida ...
to solicit papers for submission. Although it has an address in southern California, according to Jeffrey Beall
Jeffrey Beall is an American librarian and library scientist, best known for drawing attention to "predatory open access publishing", a term he coined, and for creating what is now widely known as Beall's list, a list of potentially predatory op ...
it is a Chinese operation. In 2014 there was a mass resignation of the editorial board of one of the company's journals, ''Advances in Anthropology'', with the outgoing editor-in-chief saying of the publisher "For them it was only about making money. We were simply their 'front'."
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
An archive is an accumulation of historical records or materials – in any medium – or the physical facility in which they are located.
Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or ...
their work ( Green OA). Preprint
In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may be available, often as a non-typeset versio ...
, postprint
A postprint is a digital draft of a research journal article ''after'' it has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication, but ''before'' it has been typeset and formatted by the journal.
Related terminology
A digital draft before peer rev ...
, and the publisher's PDF
Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...
version may be used. According to the society's website, journals published are fully open access, with reuse rights based on CC-BY
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/lyrics ...
or CC BY-NC
A Creative Commons NonCommercial license (CC NC, CC BY-NC or NC license) is a Creative Commons license which a copyright holder can apply to their media to give public permission for anyone to reuse that media only for noncommercial activities. C ...
.
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. Several of these publications have subsequently been retracted. Some of the journals had listed academics on their editorial board
The editorial board is a group of experts, usually at a publication, who dictate the tone and direction the publication's editorial policy will take.
Mass media
At a newspaper, the editorial board usually consists of the editorial page editor, a ...
s without their permission or even knowledge, sometimes in fields very different from their own. In 2012, one of its journals, ''Advances in Pure Mathematics'', accepted a paper written by a parody generator
Parody generators are computer programs which generate text that is syntactically correct, but usually meaningless, often in the style of a technical paper or a particular writer. They are also called travesty generators and random text generato ...
; the paper was not published, but only due to its author's unwillingness to pay the publication fee. The company has also been noted for the many unsolicited bulk emails it sends to academics about its journals.
In 2013, the ''Open Journal of Pediatrics'', a SCIRP journal, published a study which concluded that the number of babies born with thyroid problems in the western United States increased by 16 percent in 2011 compared to 2010, after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster
The was a nuclear accident in 2011 at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Ōkuma, Fukushima, Japan. The proximate cause of the disaster was the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, which occurred on the afternoon of 11 March 2011 and ...
. The study has been criticized for not taking into account the fact that 2010 was a year with an unusually low number of births with thyroid problems. SCIRP refused to print a letter criticizing the study, but offered to publish it as an article for a charge.
The company has been included in a list of questionable open access publishers, according to Jeffrey Beall
Jeffrey Beall is an American librarian and library scientist, best known for drawing attention to "predatory open access publishing", a term he coined, and for creating what is now widely known as Beall's list, a list of potentially predatory op ...
's criteria. 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."[
Further controversy was generated by a mass resignation of the ]editorial board
The editorial board is a group of experts, usually at a publication, who dictate the tone and direction the publication's editorial policy will take.
Mass media
At a newspaper, the editorial board usually consists of the editorial page editor, a ...
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.
In 2021 Cabells' Predatory Reports described SCIRP as a "well-known predatory publisher". In the Norwegian Scientific Index
CRIStin (Current Research Information System in Norway) is the national research information system of Norway, and is owned by the Royal Ministry of Education and Research. CRIStin documents all scholarly publications by Norwegian researchers, an ...
the publisher and all of its journals have a rating of 0 (non-academic).
See also
* Academic publishing in China
Today in China, there are more than 8,000 academic journals, of which more than 4,600 can be considered scientific. About 1,400 cover health science (medicine and public health). In 2022, it was reported that China has become one of the top count ...
* Predatory open-access publishing
Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors without checking articles for quality and legitimacy, and withou ...
* Predatory conference
Predatory conferences or predatory meetings are meetings set up to appear as legitimate scientific conferences but which are exploitative as they do not provide proper editorial control over presentations, and advertising can include claims of invo ...
* 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 ...
* Directory of Open Access Journals
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a website that hosts a community-curated list of open access journals, maintained by Infrastructure Services for Open Access (IS4OA). It was launched in 2003 with 300 open access journals. The proje ...
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Scientific research publishing
Academic publishing companies
Open access publishers
Publishing companies established in 2007
2007 establishments in China
Companies based in Wuhan