Mohammad
I have looked at World Applied Sciences journal, which has over 5000 articles indexed on Scopus. Just about 6 months ago, only one paper had more than 10 citations and it was criticized for publishing low quality articles on some Iranian websites. This journal was blacklisted by Iranian ministry of education preventing many people of publishing papers on this journal. All IDOSI journals were also delisted from ISC index.
Suddenly, in less than a few weeks, the number of citations for some of the papers on this journal was jumped to 39 on Scopus database. If one clicks on cite option on Scopus, he/she can easily understand that all citations come from another IDOSI journal. This is a simple manipulation of citation!
I believe the manager of IDOSI has been destroying other OA good quality publishers and creating an excuse for people like Beall to mix all good and bad OA publishers building a black list.
I agree with you that OA journals like “Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences” published by ELSEVIER are clear cases of predatory publishers where the editors don’t even bother to check the abstracts of the papers published and may be the reason behind Scopus team for deleting IDOSI papers from Scopus, but I do appreciate their actions against IDOSI for raising some awareness on scientific society so that other OA publishers care more about their publications.
I believe any manipulation of citation is bad not matter it happens from an OA publisher or from a good quality journal published by well known publisher.
Farid
