How not to entice an author
November 6th, 2012
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| …There’s a “tree” in it… “Fall New England” image by flickr user BrtinBoston. Used by permission. |
I received the attached email, inviting a contribution to a journal called Advances in Forestry Letter. Yes, that’s “Letter” in the singular, which is even still optimistic given the number of papers they’ve published so far, viz., none. For a week or so after I received the email, the journal’s web site was down. It’s back up now, and we can glean some further information about this “journal”. It is claimed to be published by “World Academic Publishers” (already listed in Jeffrey Beall’s list of predatory publishers), though the publisher’s site does not list the journal as of this writing. The listing of covered topics from their “Focus and Scope” page seems to have been plagiarized from the corresponding listing for the MDPI journal Forests.
Why am I, a computer scientist, being invited to submit an article on forestry? On the basis of being the author of an article entitled “Optimal k-arization of synchronous tree-adjoining grammar“. (Actually, they got that wrong too. I’m a co-author, along with Rebecca Nesson and Giorgio Satta.) See? There’s a “tree” in it. It must be about forestry.
I have half a mind to submit the article to them (after making it “80% different”) and see what happens. Read the rest of this entry »