Canadian Publisher Has Open-Access “Evil Twin”

Ontario-based Andrew John Publishing Inc. has two websites, one for its subscription journals and print monographs, and a secretive new one that also includes its in-progress, open-access division. The open-access division has ties to India and may be connected to U.S.-based publisher Allied Academies.

A wise person once said, “Be wary of any publisher whose name is comprised of two English forenames.” Andrew John has two websites. Its main website ends in “.com” — while its new, secretive website ends in “.org”, and the second might be considered an “evil twin.”

• Public website: http://www.andrewjohnpublishing.com/
• Secret website: http://www.andrewjohnpublishing.org/

The new, “secret” website has a page with six, newly-launched open-access journals, a page not present on the .com website. These journals are all broad in scope and represent fields already saturated with open-access journals, such as Journal of HIV Research.

The Andrew John open-access journals are currently spamming for editorial board members:

Invitation for the Editorial Board Membership

Dear Dr. [Redacted],

Andrew John Publishing Inc. is pleased to introduce the launch of Journal of Psychology and Cognition (JPC).

Journal of Psychology and Cognition is a new peer-reviewed online/open access journal that aims to publish the most complete and reliable source of information on the discoveries and current developments in the area of Psychology and Cognition Research.

Andrew John Publishing Inc. was established in 1999 and is a full-service health science publishing house.

Based on your scientific achievements and outstanding contributions in the field of Nanoscience, we cordially invite you to join the Editorial Board for JPC.

The primary responsibility of Editorial Board members will be to review papers, helping to provide a consistent level of quality in the peer-review process. Ideally, papers will be reviewed by one Editorial Board member and two external reviewers. Basically, you will be invited to review up to three to five articles a year. You will have an option of turning down the assignment invitation if you are too busy or if the article is out of your area of interest.

We sincerely hope that you will consider our invitation to join the Editorial Board. We look forward to hearing from you.

Please feel free to contact us for any queries, concerns or comments.

Thank you.

Regards,

Elisa Martin
Editorial Coordinator
Journal of Nanoscience & Applications

Andrew John Publishing

(Note how the spam email erroneously refers to nanoscience rather than psychology, a spam template error.)

Strangely, when I click on the journal cover image for Andrew John’s Journal of Environmental Sciences and Climate Study on this page, I am taken to a list of files on a server whose web address is http://www.alliedacademies.org/admin/flyer-pdfs/.

This is a link to the American publisher called Allied Academies, an old, bottom-tier subscription publisher that began adding low-quality, open-access journals to its journal fleet last year.

I added Allied Academies to my list in 2015 after I noticed it began launching broad open-access journals. These new journals supplement Allied Academies’ fleet of broad-scoped business journals.

For years, I’ve been receiving emails from people either asking me to add Allied Academies to my list or asking why it wasn’t on the list.

One of Allied Academies’ new open-access journals, the International Journal of Pure and Applied Zoology, proclaims a fake impact factor.

For me, these questions remain unanswered:

1. What is the connection between Andrew John Publishing and Allied Academies?

3. Who or what firm in India is helping these two publishers launch open-access journals?
4. Why is Allied Academies using a fake impact factor for one of its journals?

Appendix 1.

List of Andrew John Publishing open-access journals as of 2016-02-06:

1. Journal of Clinical Infectious Diseases and Medicine
2. Journal of Environmental Sciences and Climate Study
3. Journal of Functional and Comparative Genomics
4. Journal of HIV Research
5. Journal of Nanoscience: Current Research
6. Journal of Psychology and Cognition

Appendix 2.

List of Allied Academies open-access journals as of 2016-02-06:

1. Advanced Materials Science Research
2. Biomedical Research
3. Current Pediatric Research
4. International Journal of Pure and Applied Zoology
5. Journal of Gastroenterology and Digestive Diseases
6. Journal of Medical Oncology and Therapeutics
7. Journal of Neurology and Neurorehabilitation Research
8. Ocular Biology Reports
9. Otolaryngology Online Journal
10. Research Journal of Allergy and Immunology

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2016 at 9:00 AM and is filed under Scholarly Open-Access Publishers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.