Pay to Play--Publish for a Price: The Myths and Manipulation of the New Corporate Open-Access Journals

Abstract: If scholarly publishing were not sufficiently challenging, a new danger arises in the realm of academic misconduct by fraudulent Open-Access pseudo-publishing by Middle East-based (especially Bangladesh) “corporations” with pay-for-play predominantly online so-called “journals.” Incessant email spamming with disregard of repeated requests to unsubscribe led me to investigate them. That inclination intersected with the increasing failures of other journals’ reviewers and editors. This combined with higher education periodical and business page reports on debates on the movement toward Open Access publishing and its conflicts with traditional subscription and academic organizations’ periodicals led me to conduct a controlled experiment