Hilarious

Jeffrey Beall maintains a website which critically follows several open access publishers in the field of science. He even maintains a list of the publishers, which he calls “Potential, possible, or probable predatory publishers” (http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/ and http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/12/06/bealls-list-of-predatory-publishers-2013/#more-1036 ).

I wish to add that they may be predatory, but above all some of them may be considered ‘hilarious’. I give you two examples:

1. Recently I received an e-mail from a publisher, let’s call them the Comics Publishing Group. The mail was actually addressed to one of our secretaries, asking her to become a member of the organizing committee for a prestigious congress, which will be held next year in a beautiful Spanish city. Being a sun lover, she was extremely excited. Not only that, she also was invited to give a plenary lecture to the attending medical specialists from all over the world.

2. The ‘Buymything Publishers Group’ sent me an e-mail stating that a specific paper which I had published in the field of diabetes had been cited more than 6 times and was in the world’s top one percent of papers. They judged that such a high number of citations reflects the high quality and influence of my paper. Now this was a nice paper, but to state that more than 6 citations would rank it in the top one percent would be a little exaggerated. Fortunately, this 2005 paper has been cited 68 times until now, but still that is not a number which I would consider a “milestone in my career”. Their enthusiastic appraisal, however, was merely introduction to arouse my appetite, since the following paragraph cordially invited me to submit a review paper without any restriction on number of words, figures (color, B/W), tables, references, etc. Not only that, also this paper would be published free of charge after peer review. An excellent opportunity, one might think, although the deadline for submission (August 31) was remarkably close: I received the e-mail on August 24.

Needless to say that I intend to remain on the mailing lists of these publishers. They lighten up my life, I have many more interesting topics to share when hanging around at the coffee machine, and above all, they beat ‘Joke of the Day’.