Unitedscholars.net. There’s an interesting site. The info is nicely hidden. Someone put some money into that one. & that copyright transfer policy—very handy for subsequently selling books on Amazon (probably why the submission fee is so low). While they seem new on the open access scene, I have my doubts as to whether a newbie could have this operation running so smoothly from the start. So, in order to dig a little deeper, I downloaded their
‘Instructions for Book Chapter Authors’ (http://www.unitedscholars.net/books.html)
document and decided to try my hand at googling a phrase that seemed generic enough to belong to a sister operation, but hopefully less likely to be from an unrelated (or ‘non-predatory’) publisher.
Here’s what I googled:
“If there are any figures or other material which the publisher is unable to utilize, the submission is also considered to be incomplete”
This search turned out almost a page worth of results dedicated to Nova Science Publishers (novapublishers.com) or…
these guys: https://scholarlyoa.com/2015/05/26/watch-out-for-publishers-with-nova-in-their-name/
I clicked on the following result, which features a ‘Note for Contributors:’
https://www.novapublishers.com/catalog/contrib.php?products_id=8943
Here’s Nova’s text:
“If there are any figures that the Publisher is unable to utilize, the submission is also considered incomplete.”
Here’s some more overlap:
United Scholars- “All diagrams, photographs, illustrations and charts (not tables) are to be referred to in the text as Figures and should be numbered consecutively. These figures must be supplied as separate electronic files named in the format in which they were created and must be in one of the following formats: tiff, bitmap, jpeg, gif, ppt, psd, png or eps. The required resolution of these figures must be 350-750 dpi. The higher the resolution, the clearer the printed image.”
Nova- “All diagrams, photographs, illustrations, and charts (not tables) should be referred to in the text as Figures, and they should be numbered consecutively with Arabic numerals. These figures must be supplied as separate electronic files named in the format in which they were created, and they must be one of the following types: tiff, bitmap, jpeg, gif, ppt, psd, png, or eps. The resolution of these figures must be 350-750 dpi. The higher the resolution, the clearer the printed image.”
Then, upon inspecting Nova’s copyright transfer form (manuscript submission), I found that it is unquestionably identical to United Publisher’s (complete with the big red text at the top):
Nova-
https://www.novapublishers.com/web/web_files/ForAuthorDocuments/Copyright%20Transfer%20Form%20with%20Manuscript%20Submission.pdf
United (form download links are on the far right, upper middle)-
http://www.unitedscholars.net/books.html
Nova Science also happens to have a handy Amazon account where they profit from your work. Same old song and dance.
