Following almost one month of relentless contacts (including painful conflicts) to over 100 individuals related with this publisher and journal, including traceable authors, individuals within the Iranian Ministry of Education, CABI, DOAJ, Jeffrey Beall and others, I am pleased to inform readers that, most likely under pressure by the Islamic Republic of Iran, which hosts the online journal, that all content from 2010-2013 is back online. But who is actually hosing it? Not only does this case demonstrate the real on-the-ground negative effects that a supposedly academic open access publisher poses to the security of digital information, but also shows how volatile the world of open access publishing is. Finally, there is only one set of victims here: scientists.
There is now massive urgency in formally capturing all information from that web-site. For example, I have now personally taken screen shots and copies of ALL the web-pages, as proof just in case there is another “disappearing” incident in the future. I have screened the contents of all the journal volumes and I estimate that between 93 and 98% of the authorship is from Iran, with very few authors from India, Turkey, Pakistan, Malaysia and Nigeria. Also, all PDF files need to desperately be downloaded and archived, also just in case the publisher “fades away” in the future. I have asked DOAJ to consider this, but to balance archiving for historical needs vs archiving for academic needs will become a very important issue to consider moving forward by these indexing / abstracting companies like CABI.
Most importantly, post-publication peer review is seriously and urgently required. For example, one will notice 8 papers by one pair of Iranian researchers (Neda Ozhan and Maryam Hajibabaei) that have ample errors, even basic ones (e.g., in the titles). These papers were published recently in the September issue of Volume 4, 2013 [1]. VictorQuest referred to itself as an academic publisher, claiming “The International Journal of Agronomy and Plant Production (IJAPP) (ISSN 2051-1914) is an open access journal that publishes high-quality solicited and unsolicited articles, in English, in all areas of agronomy and Plant production including actual problems of modern agriculture incl. crop and animal science, genetics, economics, technical aspects, agriculture and environmental relations and etc. in the temperate regions of the world. All articles published in IJAPP will be peer-reviewed.” [2]
Why does CABI (and Elsevier) archive papers by what is clearly a very problematic publisher / journal [3]? IJAPP claims to employ high publishing ethics (i.e., COPE ethics [4]) when its parent company is involve din questionable academic practices. Clicking on the COPE link leads from the IJAPP / VictorQuest web-site to another unidentifiable publisher that publishes a journal “Scientific Research and Review Journal (SRRJ)”. Does COPE agree being used by this and other publishers in this way? If yes, then why, especially since VictorQuest and IJAPP are not COPE members [5]? Even if it wanted to, could COPE launch a complaint with VictorQuest Publications to disassociate itself with COPE, given the fact that VictorQuest Ltd. is now a dissolved UK company?
I am personally of the opinion that the literature that is rapidly proliferating in these “types” of journals pose a serious risk to the academic integrity of the scientific literature, as much as high-profile cases in top-level IF journals, simply because these papers are increasingly creeping into the literature, by being referenced in more and more truly mainstream academic journals. Finally, isn’t it odd why one cannot access the content of the first two issues of Volume 5, in 2014 [6]?
In closing, I should add that Jeffrey Beall covered this case well on his blog today.
[1] http://www.ijappjournal.com/2013-4-9/
[2] http://www.ijappjournal.com/about-the-journal/
[3] http://www.ijappjournal.com/abstracted-indexed-in/
[4] http://www.ijappjournal.com/publisher/ (If you click on the COPE link, it leads to an unrelated IJAGCS.com PDF document)
[5] http://publicationethics.org/members
[6] http://www.ijappjournal.com/2014-2/
