I was recently asked to review a paper for the journal ‘Energies’ (which I thought was a strange title). When I hear of a journal I am not familiar with, I check Beall’s list. I declined the invitation. I will admit that the process they provided (title and abstract of paper in email, and a ink to an accept/decline invitation) is consistent with other journals I review papers for: simple and professional. However, given the number of journals on the topic of energy, and the fact that the paper was actually on environmental radioactivity, I openly question why the authors decided to submit the paper to this journal as opposed to a well established journal on topic. It makes me question whether the paper has already been rejected elsewhere or the authors are aware of dubious quality of their work. I do not have time to review poor research (which of course I am speculating on).
On a completely separate thought, I am not sure how the publishing costs should be factored into any analysis of credibility. I recently has a paper accepted in a credible journal….and they had an option to make it open access (which involved more paperwork and a $3k fee). I do not normally publish open access, but in this case, the paper was more of a policy/opinion piece and I wanted it to have broad coverage to an international market. So, the choice to pay (a very high figure over the per page charge) for the open access option was mine alone. Is this predatory? I am not sure.
In any case, thank you for the hard work.
Ed
