New Junk Publisher: MASAUM Network

I recently received the following invitation in an e-mail from mjmms@masaumnet.com:

Dear  Colleague

I am glad to invite you as Guest Editor of MASAUM Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences for year 2012. If you are interested to join us as guest editor, please send us following information ASAP.

Full Name with Title :
Designation:
Affiliation:
City & Country:
Email:
Area of Interest in Research:
Latest Picture (optional):


You are further invited to submit you valuable work for the first issue of the journal. Submission deadline is Jan 05, 2012.

Your earlier and positive response will be highly appreciated.

Managing Editor
MJMSS

 

It struck me as strange that someone would consider me so important as to qualify to be a guest editor of his journal, yet needed me to send him my name.  The reason is obvious: this message was probably spammed to thousands (or more) of my colleagues.

As readers of this blog may know, publishers like this are one of my pet peeves.  So I investigated a bit.  What I found was entertaining.  The publisher's homepage is www.masaumnet.com.  There one learns that "MASAUM Network has a good team of well repute Professors..." but evidently cannot afford to hire someone with the ability to write a grammatically correct sentence in English.  As I expected, the publisher has an online-only, "Open Access" model that really means author-pay.  The cost to publish an article is not terribly high ($200), although in a bizarre twist the price depends on the number of pages (shouldn't it depend on the number of MB?)  Even more entertaining is the fact that their instructions for authors state

Paper submissions are accepted only in Doc format.  Other formats will not be accepted.

That alone guarantees they will not get any serious mathematics submissions.

Today, I received the following highly alarming message:

Dear Colleague

I am glad to inform you that information about you has been added at
www.masaumnet.com/ebmjmss.html.

Please check and confirm information displayed about you.

If correction is needed ,let us know about it.

If information about you has been missing ,please send us following information about you
ASAP.

Full Name with Title :
Designation:
Affiliation:
City & Country:
Email:
Area of Interest in Research:
Latest Picture (optional):


You are further invited to submit you valuable work for the first issue of the journal.

Submission deadline is Jan 15, 2012.

Please forward this to concerned persons.

Your earlier and positive response will be highly appreciated.



shiella Nancy
Chief Coordinator
on the behalf of
Managing Editor
MJMMS

At this point, I myself was a "concerned person"!  So I followed the link and breathed a sigh of relief when I realized that my name does not appear anywhere on the page it leads to.  I've let them know in no uncertain terms that they are not authorized to use my name.

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In defense of "Open Submission" in scientific publishing

The much-trumpeted "Open Access" movement in scientific publishing promises to revolutionize scientific accessibility, so that anyone can freely obtain the latest scientific research publications.  In this brave new world, the evil profit-driven publishers no longer prey upon the scientific community and taxpayers are no longer unjustly kept from reading about the work their taxes pay for.

Unfortunately, the reality of open access has become virtually synonymous with the "author-pay" publishing model.   In the name of making scientific publishing more open, author-pay publishing raises a whole new barrier.  Instead of requiring the reader to pay for access, the author (i.e., the scientist) now must pay to have his article published.  So we are gaining freedom of access in exchange for giving up freedom of submission.  Does that make any sense?

Consider the following quote from one of the great promoters of Open Access, Michael Nielsen:

Einstein’s proposals were astounding, yet his arguments were so compelling that his work was published in one of the leading physics journals of his day, and was rapidly accepted by most leading physicists. How remarkable that an outsider, a virtual unknown, could come in to challenge many of our most fundamental beliefs about how the universe works. And, in no time at all, the community of physicists essentially said, “Yeah, you’re right.”

(Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science)

The reason Einstein's ideas gained rapid acceptance is that anyone -- even a patent clerk with no grant money! -- could submit their work to a leading journal and have it refereed by the experts.  What would have happened if the Open Access movement had transformed scientific publishing before he came along?

Perhaps our children will one day launch an "Open Submission" campaign, crying that grad students and scientists from third world countries must no longer be barred from publishing just because they can't pay.  Let's make sure they don't have to.  Open submission, always taken for granted until now, must be one of the fundamental tenets of scientific publishing. Say no to author-pay journals.  Don't submit work to them, don't referee for them, and don't serve as editors for them.

There is a better road to open access.  Put all your papers on the arXiv.  Publish only in journals that allow you to post a final version on your website (or institutional server).

 

Addendum:

The many potential evils of the author-pay model are explained in more detail in two articles published in the Notices of the AMS:

http://www.ams.org/notices/201109/rtx110901294p.pdf

http://www.ams.org/notices/200803/tx080300381p.pdf