Spamming in scholarly publishing: A case study

Spam has become an issue of concern in almost all areas where the Internet is involved, and many people today have become victims of spam from publishers and individual journals. We studied this phenomenon in the field of scholarly publishing from the perspective of a single author. We examined 1,024 such spam e-mails received by Marcin Kozak from publishers and journals over a period of 391 days, asking him to submit an article to their journal. We collected the following information: where the request came from; publishing model applied; fees charged; inclusion or not in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ); and presence or not in Beall’s (2014) listing of dubious journals. Our research showed that most of the publishers that sent e-mails inviting manuscripts were (i) using the open access model, (ii) using article-processing charges to fund their journal’s operations; (iii) offering very short peer-review times, (iv) on Beall’s list, and (v) misrepresenting the location of their headquarters. Some years ago, a letter of invitation to submit an article to a particular journal was considered a kind of distinction. Today, e-mails inviting submissions are generally spam, something that misleads young researchers and irritates experienced ones.