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 ...

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 ...

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

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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

'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

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).

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

Open access type

Controversies

See also

References

External links