Hindawi (publisher)

The Hindawi Publishing Corporation was founded in 1997 in Cairo by Ahmed Hindawi and his wife Nagwa Abdel-Mottaleb.[14][15][16] The company's first journal was the International Journal of Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences, which it acquired from a prior publisher. By 2006 Hindawi Publishing owned 48 journals and had about 220 employees, and published journals in the physical and life sciences and medical research.[16] In February 2007, Hindawi moved to a complete open access model on all of its journals.[17][18] By 2007, Hindawi was publishing around 100 journals, 21 of which were ISI listed, and claimed to be second largest publisher in PubMed Central, an open access journal repository. The company had a 40% article acceptance rate. Article publication fees averaged $800, varying by journal and page count, being significantly less than prices charged by major open access competitors including BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science.[19]

Two corporations currently act under the name of Hindawi: Hindawi Limited, based in London,[20] and Hindawi Publishing Corporation (HPC),[21] based in Cairo. The original publishing company, Hindawi Publishing Corporation, was founded in Cairo in 1997 by Ahmed Hindawi and Nagwa Abdelmottaleb [22] and now acts merely as a publishing services provider to Hindawi Ltd.[23] Hindawi Ltd was founded in London in 2013 by Ahmed Hindawi and had acquired all the assets and intellectual property of Hindawi Publishing Corporation by 2017.[24] The Chief Executive Officer is Paul Peters.

In December 2020, John Wiley & Sons acquired Hindawi Limited for an enterprise value of $300 million.[5] The transaction closed 31 December 2020.

Between 2009 and 2011, the number of Hindawi journals nearly doubled, and Hindawi's output increased from 2,500 to 13,000 articles per year.[lower-alpha 1] By 2011, Hindawi was publishing 300 journals,[lower-alpha 1] and had a staff of over 450 people.[25] The growth of the company has come from publishing new start-up journals, as well as acquisitions of established journals[16] such as Psyche, an entomological journal founded in 1874.[26] Two major factors facilitating the company's growth have been the low labor costs and well-educated middle class of Cairo.[25] As of April 2019 Hindawi's publishing portfolio includes 233 journals.[27]

In 2010, a subset of Hindawi journals were included in a list of suspected predatory open access publishers by Jeffrey Beall; however Beall later removed Hindawi from his list after re-evaluating the company, calling it a "borderline case".[28] Beall has also criticized Hindawi for representing the offshoring of scholarly publishing,[29] a view which has been criticized as neocolonialist.[30]

In 2013, two of its journals (Chemotherapy Research and Practice and ISRN Oncology) were targeted in the Who's Afraid of Peer Review? sting operation and both rejected the fake paper.[31] Likewise, in 2017, another Hindawi journal was included as a target of a sting operation with a Star Wars themed fake research paper. It was submitted to Hindawi's journal Advances in Medicine, the journal rejected the paper.[32]

In 2014, three Hindawi journals faced delisting from Journal Citation Reports for anomalous citation patterns, particularly self-citations and citation stacking. The three include The Scientific World Journal, although the problems with this journal occurred partly before Hindawi acquired the journal.[33] Open access journalist Richard Poynder considers this incident anomalous itself,[15] and Retraction Watch has noted that Hindawi's sanctions for authors who manipulate citations – including 3 year bans of author submissions – are stricter than those of many other journals.[34]

In 2015, after an internal investigation, Hindawi flagged 32 published papers for re-review due to three editors subverting the peer review process with fake email accounts.[35]

In 2018 a Hindawi journal, Journal of Environmental and Public Health, published an epidemiological paper on glioblastoma, none of the authors of which had academic appointments.[36] The paper was accompanied by a press release that overstated the importance of findings with respect to the hypothesis that cell phones are dangerous, and the results of the paper in media interviews by the authors.[36][37]

Hindawi charges authors an article processing charge.[16][38] Hindawi's article processing charges vary by journal but on average are lower than other large open access publishers.[19] By 2012, the company had a profit margin of around 50%, higher than the 2008 average of 35% for commercial publishers.[39]

Most Hindawi journals do not have editors-in-chief, but rather have editorial boards consisting of staff and a volunteer board composed of 30 to 300 scholars.[25] There is some concern that this style may lead to lower quality output,[40][41] or at least the potential for it. However, journalist Poynder states: "there is no evidence that Hindawi's editorial approach, or the way in which it recruits authors, has had any serious consequences so far as the quality of its papers is concerned," although he notes that some articles contain poor copy-editing.[15] At least one Hindawi journal (Pain Research and Management[42]) has an editor-in-chief.

Hindawi has been criticized for its use of unsolicited e-mail, with some claiming it is the chief method of attracting manuscripts and editorial board members.[43][44][45][46] However, others claim that e-mail spam from many publishers is increasing, with open access advocate Stevan Harnad of the University of Southampton stating that while the practice should be frowned upon:

"I think it's true that Hindawi spams no more than other legitimate businesses and organizations spam today. That may not be an admirable standard but it's a realistic one. In this context, Hindawi's promotional messages don't deserve to be singled out for stigmatization."[15]

• Academic publishing
• List of Hindawi academic journals
• Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, of which Hindawi is a founding member

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Media from Hindawi.

• Official website