You probably receive a lot of spam e-mail but there is one kind which is particularly interesting. It is spam which comes from publishers inviting you to write an article to be published in their journal. Some of these invitations are legitimate but there are those which are not. There are some signs which will tell you which kind of invitation it is – serious or not. Maybe the e-mail starts with Dear but your name doesn’t follow or maybe they write that they know about your research but the subject area their journal belongs to is not anywhere near your subject area, like in the example below. It is spam that I got and they mean they know my research about modern economy but they could not be more wrong. Click on the image to enlarge it.
It is also good to look up the publishers. This publishers, SCIRP Scientific Research Publishing Inc., I know is grey publisher. If you are hesitant please contact the library or me – we can help you to find out. Another good way to to sort out the bad apples is to check the e-mail the invitation comes from. It should come from the person who has signed the e-mail but also it should come from the publishers mailsystem – not yahoo or hotmail. In this case it comes from some other e-mail and it strengthens my believe that this is not an invitation to publish in a legitimate journal.
Other good tips to recognize gray publishers can be found Scholarly Open Access or in in the guide for gray OA-publishers.
Pieta Eklund