An April 18, 2018 article on the Society for Scholarly Authors’ blog, The Scholarly Kitchen, called attention to a scam in which unknown individuals, using fake acceptance letters, are promising publication in the journal of the American Society of Civil Engineers.
The article’s author, Angela Cochran, ASCE’s associate publisher and journals director, said that over the last five years, the society has become aware of seven fake acceptance letters for its journals.
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As an author and publisher (and new member of TAA) preparing manuscripts of my own design and assisting other authors to do the same, I needed a service that was cost-effective and efficient. After researching several different services, I selected CreateSpace.com, which is a part of Amazon, because it allowed me to print quality textbooks for pennies on the dollar. I also like this service because of the free ISBN number and the fact that if you intend to revise an edition you can lock in the ISBN number for subsequent editions.
Cengage’s Chief Product Officer Fernando Bleichmar said the company will continue to honor its contractual obligations with authors under the Cengage Unlimited model, but that the contract they have with authors generally grants them the discretion to publish the work in the way they think best helps drive the sales of those titles.
“We have spent significant time with our internal teams making sure the contracts allow us to do the Unlimited model,” he said. “The contracts are established in a way in which the publishers have the discretion of evolving the model that benefits both the authors and the publisher, and our contracts allow the creation of different models. We are going through all the details in the contracts, having those conversations with our authors to make sure they are comfortable with the Unlimited model as we move forward.”
In a statement released November 3, 2017, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) encouraged authors to publish NIH-funded research papers in reputable journals “to protect the credibility of published research.”
According to the statement: “The NIH has noted an increase in the numbers of papers reported as products of NIH funding which are published in journals or by publishers that do not follow best practices promoted by professional scholarly publishing organizations.”
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was awarded a preliminary injunction by the U.S. Court of the District of Nevada against defendants OMICS Group Inc., iMedPub LLC, and Conference Series LLC, to stop them from engaging in alleged unfair and deceptive practices in the publication of online academic journals and the organization of scientific conferences.
The injunction also requires the defendants to identify assets and account for their current finances, and to preserve financial records.
