Scientific Research Publishing

Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP) is an academic publisher of presumably peer-reviewed open-access electronic journals, conference proceedings, and scientific anthologies of questionable quality.[1][2][3] Although it has an address in southern California, but according to Jeffrey Beall it is a Chinese operation.[4]

Scientific Research Publishing
StatusActive
Founded2007 (2007)
FounderHuaibei Zhou
Headquarters locationWuhan, China
DistributionWorldwide
Key peopleHuaibei Zhou
Publication typesAcademic journals and books
Nonfiction topicsLife sciences, economics, chemistry, computer science, environmental sciences, engineering, medicine, physics, mathematics, social sciences
No. of employeesAbout 160
Official websitewww.scirp.org

As of December 2014, it offered 244 English-language open-access journals in the areas of science, technology, business, economy, and medicine.[5]

The company has been accused of being a predatory open access publisher[6] by Jeffrey Beall and of using email spam to solicit papers for submission.[4] 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'."[7]

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 their work (Green OA). Preprint, postprint, and the publisher's PDF version may be used.[8] According to the society's website, journals published are fully open access, with reuse rights based on CC-BY or CC BY-NC.

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or permission from the original author and of the copyright holder.[9] Several of these publications have subsequently been retracted.[2] Some of the journals had listed academics on their editorial boards without their permission or even knowledge, sometimes in fields very different from their own.[10] In 2012, one of its journals, Advances in Pure Mathematics, accepted a paper written by a parody generator; the paper was not published, but only due to its author's unwillingness to pay the publication fee.[11] The company has also been noted for the many unsolicited bulk emails it sends to academics about its journals.[4][10]

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 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.[3]

The company has been included in a list of questionable open access publishers,[12][13] according to Jeffrey Beall's criteria.[14] 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."[4]

Further controversy was generated by a mass resignation of the editorial board 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.[1]

Norwegian Scientific Index

In the Norwegian Scientific Index the publisher and all of its journals have a rating of 0 (non-academic).[15]

See also

References
  1. Beall, Jeffrey (2014-10-02). "An Editorial Board Mass-Resignation — from an Open-Access Journal". Scholarly Open Access. Archived from the original on 2014-10-18. Retrieved 2015-01-08.
  2. Oransky, Ivan (2012-05-25). "Three more retractions for Vietnamese physicists who plagiarized a plagiarized paper". Retraction Watch. Retrieved 2015-01-13.
  3. "Spears: 'Universe is Like Space Ship' — and the problem with 'predatory' science journals". Ottawa Citizen. May 16, 2015. Retrieved August 9, 2019.
  4. Beall, Jeffrey (April 2012). "Five Scholarly Open Access Publishers" (PDF). The Charleston Advisor. 13 (4): 5–10. doi:10.5260/chara.13.4.5.
  5. Jeffrey Beall (2014-12-16). "The Chinese Publisher SCIRP (Scientific Research Publishing): A Publishing Empire Built on Junk Science". Archived from the original on 2014-12-27. Retrieved 2015-01-08.
  6. List of predatory publishers by scholarlyoa.com
  7. Beall, Jeffrey (2014-10-02). "An Editorial Board Mass-Resignation — from an Open-Access Journal". Scholarly Open Access. Archived from the original on 2015-04-11. Retrieved 2015-09-04.
  8. "Scientific Research Publishing". SHERPA. Retrieved 2013-05-28.
  9. Abrahams, Marc (2009-12-22). "Strange academic journals: Scam?". Improbable Research. Retrieved 2015-01-13.
  10. Sanderson, Katharine (2010). "Two new journals copy the old". Nature. 463 (7278): 148. doi:10.1038/463148a. PMID 20075892.
  11. Doctorow, Cory (October 19, 2012). "Math journal accepts computer-generated nonsense paper". Boing Boing.
  12. Beall, Jeffrey (2014). "List of Predatory Publishers 2014". Archived from the original on 2014-04-22. Retrieved 2014-04-21.
  13. Beall, Jeffrey (2014). "Beall's list of potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers". Archived from the original on 2016-09-17. Retrieved 2014-04-21.
  14. Beall, Jeffrey (2009-12-01). "Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access Publishers (2nd edition)". Archived from the original on 2013-02-10. Retrieved 2013-03-03.
  15. "Scientific Research Publishing". Norwegian Scientific Index. Retrieved 1 April 2020.
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