27 Aug 2008

A short post about Bentham Open

I've had my eye on Bentham Open since before various bloggers, Peter Suber and Richard Poynder raised concerns about their email marketing and the recruitment of their editorial boards.

When they launched they copied some of their instructions for authors verbatim from the BMC-series journals
, but the below really took the biscuit. Spot the difference. They stopped using that logo pretty sharpish; I think someone put a shot across their bows...




4 comments:

Crunchy said...

I'm not sure if you're still reading comments this far back but thought I'd give it a shot. Recently, a scientific journal called the "Open Chemical Physics Journal" published a paper about traces of a sophisticated explosive found in the rubble of the World Trade Center. I'm not a conspiracy theorist or anything like that, but this journal appears to be associated with Bentham Open and your site is the only one I found offering anything even resembling a critique of that organization. I was wondering, do you think the Open Chemical Physics Journal is a legitimate journal, and should this paper on the WTC be taken seriously? Thanks for your time.

Brian Kaul said...

Bentham Open is mostly known for spamming researchers, so far as I can tell. I've received one or two spam solicitations from them myself. As for the 9/11 conspiracy paper, the editor-in-chief of that journal resigned because it was published without her knowledge or approval:

http://screwloosechange.blogspot.com/2009/04/bentham-editor-resigns-over-steven.html

They've also accepted nonsense articles:

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2009/06/10/nonsense-for-dollars/

Doesn't seem to be a very professional organization ...

Unknown said...

I believe this is an unfair generalization. Some of Bentham's journals are great quality (eg. Open Respiratory Med), PubMed indexed and yes, OPEN. This allows free access to a student in Costa Rica or India with no means to get a subscription to "fancy" journals.

Matt Hodgkinson said...

Thanks for the comment Jorge. I am an advocate of open access journals, having worked for the two largest open access publishers, and as a volunteer for AuthorAID I am aware of the needs of developing world authors, but authors and editors need to be careful about the reputability of the journals and publishers they associate with.

Bentham Open was reviewed here in 2009: http://eprints.rclis.org/bitstream/10760/13538/1/s8.pdf and here in 2008 (including an interview with the Editorial Director): http://www.richardpoynder.co.uk/Honan.pdf