Alasdair, thank you so much for this comprehensive information - much appreciated.

--Barb
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-----Original Message-----
From: HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Alasdair Brooks
Sent: Wednesday, March 8, 2017 5:15 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Still more on fake journals

Everyone,

Just following up quickly on the posts from Barbara Voss and Mitch Allen on fake journals.   Mitch's summary of predatory open access is excellent and well worth reading.  As editor of Post-Medieval Archaeology I've been following the predatory open access market with some interest, and read Beall's blog page (as mentioned by Mitch) regularly.  I also tend to get swamped with invitations to join editorial boards and attend conferences on the basis of my editorship.  I would just add a few points.

1) It looks like Beall's list of predatory open access journals is set to be replaced this spring by a firm called Cabell’s International, which has hired Jeffrey Beall as a consultant; see this story from Nature:  http://www.nature.com/news/controversial-website-that-lists-predatory-publishers-shuts-down-1.21328

2) A cached copy of Beall's website, this link taking you to the list of publishers as last updated this January, is available here: https://web.archive.org/web/20170111172306/https://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/

3) Medcrave was on Beall's list; an archived version of a specific blog post from December of last year outlining the problems with Medcrave can be found here: https://web.archive.org/web/20161222210911/https://scholarlyoa.com/2016/11/03/medcrave-update-its-still-a-dangerous-predatory-publisher/

Note that the blog entry specifically mentions the 'Journal of Historical Archaeology & Anthropological Sciences'.

4) Tips to spot that the 'Journal of JHAAS Historical Archaeology & Anthropological Sciences' is a fake open access journal:
- Most of the articles are submitted from India or Pakistan (no value judgement implied; these predatory journals are generally based in India/Pakistan/Iran, and usually deliberately exploit scholars in their region)
- Much of the editorial advisory board is from India or Pakistan
- The published articles often have very little to do with the subject (in this case, see 'Psycho-Behavioral Impact of Yog Practice among Daily Life of the Youth Population-A Study Report')
- The journal 'address' is a street in the United States, but lacks an actual street number and/or is in a residential area; in this case, the claimed address is a street on the northern outskirts of Oklahoma City, but there's no street address, and the publisher is trying to obscure that it's based in Hyderabad 
- The cover of the journal has little to do with the actual topic; in this case, the cover seems to show Mesoamerican carvings.

The only upside to this is that the launch of a predatory open access journal for historical archaeology does rather suggest that we've arrived enough as a subdiscipline on the radar of an unethical publisher in Hyderabad to warrant attempted exploitation by a rapacious and unscrupulous publishing house.  Woo us.

I stress that nothing in the above should be read as a criticism of open access as a model; that's an entirely separate discussion.  This post is solely and specifically about the growing and increasingly problematic phenomenon of predatory open access publishing houses in the developing world.

In closing, and on a lighter note, my favourite predatory open access journal was the now-defunct 'Integrated Journal of British'.  "British _what_", I hear you ask.  What a silly question:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160521005754/https://scholarlyoa.com/2014/10/09/ridiculous-oa-journal-launches-with-ridiculous-title/

Short version:

Avoid these 'journals' like the plague.  Unfortunately, just like Yersinia pestis, they're not going anywhere either.

Alasdair