Hindawi (publisher)

Hindawi is a commercial publisher of scientific, technical, and medical (STM) literature. Founded in 1997, it currently publishes more than 230 peer-reviewed scientific journals as well as a number of scholarly monographs, with an annual output of roughly 20,000 articles each year.[3][4] In 2021, Hindawi was purchased by John Wiley & Sons.[5]

Hindawi
StatusActive
Founded1997 (1997)
FounderAhmed Hindawi
Country of originEgypt
Headquarters locationLondon[1]
DistributionWorldwide
Publication typesScientific journals
No. of employees42 (in 2019)[2]
Official websitewww.hindawi.com

As of April 2019, 71 (30%) of its journals were indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded, with a further 107 (46%) journals indexed in the Emerging Sources Citation Index.[6][7] The company has its headquarters in London, an office in Cairo and a virtual office address in New York City. Since 2007, all of Hindawi's journals have been open access and published under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY).[8] It is a founding member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association,[9] a participating publisher and supporter of the Initiative for Open Citations,[10][11] and a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).[12][13]

History

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.

Journals

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]

Business model

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]

See also

References

  1. based on projections from the first 8 months of 2011
  1. "A 2018 update on Hindawis Corporate Structure". about.hindawi.com. 2018-03-14. Retrieved 2019-04-02.
  2. "Meet the Team". about.hindawi.com. 2018-08-05. Retrieved 2019-04-02.
  3. "About Hindawi". about.hindawi.com. Retrieved 2018-11-18.
  4. "Books". Hindawi. Retrieved 3 April 2019.
  5. "Wiley Announces the Acquisition of Hindawi". 2021-01-07.
  6. "Hindawi Publishing Corporation - Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE)". 2019. Retrieved 2019-04-02.
  7. "Emerging Sources Citation Index". 2019. Retrieved 2019-04-02.
  8. "Hindawi Publishing Corporation - Open Access Memberships". 2013. Retrieved 2013-02-01.
  9. "OASPA Founding Members". Retrieved 2019-04-02.
  10. "Initiative for Open Citations". Retrieved 2019-04-02.
  11. MacCallum, Catriona (2018). "Promoting innovation and reducing inequity in scholarship: Europe's Plan S for Open Science". Retrieved 2019-04-02.
  12. "Publication Ethics". Retrieved 2019-04-02.
  13. "COPE: Hindawi, 232 Member Journals". Retrieved 2019-04-02.
  14. Hindawi, Ahmed (2009-01-01). "2020: A Publishing Odyssey". Serials: The Journal for the Serials Community. Ubiquity Press, Ltd. 22 (2): 99–103. doi:10.1629/2299. ISSN 0953-0460.
  15. Poynder, Richard (September 17, 2012). "The OA Interviews: Ahmed Hindawi, founder of Hindawi Publishing Corporation" (PDF). Open and Shut?.
  16. Shaw, Shelli (Sep 2006). "Hindawi Publishing: Catering to Open Access" (PDF). Information Today. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2010-11-02. Retrieved 2010-11-02.
  17. McClure, Marji (May 2008). "Case Study: Open Access Yields Solid Growth for Hindawi". Information Today. 25 (5): 1–50 (3p).
  18. Harris, Siân (April 2007). "Encouraging innovation". Research information. Archived from the original on 2010-11-02. Retrieved 2010-11-02.
  19. Brown, David J.; Boulderstone, Richard (2008). "Business Models as Drivers for Change". The Impact of Electronic Publishing: The Future for Libraries and Publishers (2nd ed.). Saur Verlag. ISBN 9783598115158.
  20. "Hindawi Limited – Overview (free company information from Companies House)".
  21. "Hindawi Publishing Corporation (Hindawi) - Company Details on ZAWYA MENA Edition".
  22. Peters, Paul (2007). "Going all the way: how Hindawi became an open access publisher". Learned Publishing. 20 (3): 191–5. doi:10.1087/095315107X204049. S2CID 1835925.
  23. "A 2018 update on Hindawi's corporate structure". 2018-03-14.
  24. "A 2018 update on Hindawi's corporate structure". 2018-03-14.
  25. Loy, Matthew (2011). Hindawi Publishing Corporation: Growing an Open-Access Contributor-Pays Business Model. Case Study Update 2011 (PDF) (Report). New York: Ithaka S+R.
  26. "Psyche- The Club Journal". The Cambridge Entomological Club. Retrieved 17 October 2014.
  27. "Journals". Hindawi Publishing Corporation. Retrieved 2 April 2019.
  28. Butler, Declan (2013). "Investigating journals: The dark side of publishing". Nature. 495 (7442): 433–5. Bibcode:2013Natur.495..433B. doi:10.1038/495433a. PMID 23538810.
  29. Jeffrey Beall. "Hindawi's Profit Margin is Higher than Elsevier's – Scholarly Open Access". Scholarly Open Access. Archived from the original on 2015-03-07.
  30. Rob Virkar-Yates (May 16, 2013). "Are 'predatory' publishers an American export?". Analysis & Opinion. Research Information. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Europa Science Ltd.
  31. Bohannon, John (3 October 2013). "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?". Science. 342 (6154): 60–65. Bibcode:2013Sci...342...60B. doi:10.1126/science.342.6154.60. PMID 24092725.
  32. "Predatory Journals Hit By 'Star Wars' Sting". 2017-07-02. Retrieved 2019-04-02.
  33. "The Scientific World Journal Will Lose its Impact Factor — Again | Scholarly Open Access". Archived from the original on 2014-10-17.
  34. "A first? Papers retracted for citation manipulation". Retraction Watch. 2012-07-05. Retrieved 18 October 2014.
  35. "30+ papers flagged because editors may have "subverted the peer review process" with fake accounts". Retraction Watch. 2015-07-08. Retrieved 9 July 2015.
  36. "Expert reaction to paper looking at brain tumour incidence and lifestyle factors". Science Media Centre. May 3, 2018.
  37. Mazer, Benjamin (16 July 2018). "Bad Faith: When conspiracy theorists play academics and the media for fools". Science-Based Medicine.
  38. Kho, Nancy Davis (Dec 2010). "Hindawi Publishing: A Working OA Model" (PDF). Information Today.
  39. Van Noorden, Richard (27 March 2013). "Open access: The true cost of science publishing". Nature. 495 (7442): 426–429. Bibcode:2013Natur.495..426V. doi:10.1038/495426a. PMID 23538808.
  40. "Predatory Publishers Threaten to Erode Scholarly Communication" (PDF). Science Editor. 2013. Retrieved 2 April 2019.
  41. "8 Ways to Identify a Questionable Open Access Journal". American Journal Experts. Retrieved 2019-04-02.
  42. Hindawi Publishing Corporation. Cairo. Retrieved on March 2, 2016.
  43. "Predatory Journals Hit by 'Star Wars' Sting". 2017-07-22.
  44. "Hindawi: Another Dodgy OA Publisher". Aardvarchaeology. 9 January 2013. Retrieved 22 June 2016.
  45. "Dear legitimate open-access publishers: stop spamming!". Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week. 4 June 2013. Retrieved 22 June 2016.
  46. Schneider, Leonid (2016-02-15). "OA publishers Hindawi vs. Frontiers: similar, yet different". For Better Science. Retrieved 2019-04-02.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.