Dear Jeffrey, I’ve read the article of Dr. Jalalian and I don’t agree with one of the warnings he includes in his “to do/not to do” list to guide authors. He says that authors should ignore all call for papers emailed directly to them. Well, in the past 8 years, I’ve been the editor of a couple of journals in Latin America and I must say that many journals of the region do that same thing, precisely, over and over. They write directly to researchers and professors in order to ask them for a paper or to invite them to help to spread the call among other colleagues… at least it’s the way many Latin American journal editors work as many of our journals are not as well-known as the English speaking journals (as you should know, in the last few years some Latin American journals have started to be included in JCR or Scopus, but most of them are still in the bottom of these indexes because of their IFs).
Editors here go after papers, especially if their journals are still not very strong and if they’re trying to make a good job and a good peer-review process (sometimes to get 7-10 papers approved to publish an issue, you should get at least 30, 40 or more). The big difference, and that’s what Dr. Jalalian misses to emphasize, is that authors should make a distinction or look carefully to the journals that ask them directly to submit a paper and then send a bill when the paper gets easily approved (the timeline of the peer review is also a key issue; if you make it right it can take several months). The Latin American journals that I’m referring to here do not charge a cent for publishing. They’re completely supported by universities.
