{"id":7035,"date":"2014-05-12T19:43:16","date_gmt":"2014-05-12T18:43:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/?p=7035"},"modified":"2014-10-21T15:10:51","modified_gmt":"2014-10-21T14:10:51","slug":"journal-of-allergy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/sciencesurf\/2014\/05\/journal-of-allergy\/","title":{"rendered":"Journal of Allergy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Being spammed by a company called Hindawi for many years, I tried to find out a bit more about one of their journals called “Journal of Allergy”. The website http:\/\/www.hindawi.com\/journals\/ja<\/a> says<\/p>\n

Journal of Allergy is a peer-reviewed, open access journal that publishes original research articles, review articles, and clinical studies in all areas of allergy.\u00a0Journal of Allergy currently has an acceptance rate of 43%. The average time between submission and final decision is 59 days and the average time between acceptance and final publication is 34 days.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

According to their own\u00a0description, they are located in Cairo and employ some 200 to 1,000 employees. Hindawi seems to be\u00a0the name of one of their founders. In some other web sources they claim \u00a0410 Park Avenue,\u00a015th Floor, New York, USA, as their address. \u00a0Google Streetview shows at \u00a0that address a 11+2 floor building with Chase Manhattan Bank located at\u00a0the ground floor.
\nOnly 40 or so of the\u00a0500+ Hindawi journals have any impact factor associated with.
\nDeclan Butler at Nature<\/a> already wrote about these kind of journals:<\/p>\n

Open-access publishers often collect fees from authors to pay for peer review, editing and website maintenance. Beall asserts that the goal of predatory open-access publishers is to exploit this model by charging the fee without providing all the expected publishing services. These publishers, Beall says, typically display \u201can intention to deceive authors and readers, and a lack of transparency in their operations and processes\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At the moment,\u00a0the Journal of Allergy is not being\u00a0black listed by Beall<\/a>\u00a0(while Hindawi had been in the past). “Journal of Allergy” should not be confused with “The Journal of Allergy”[Jour] that has 1514 PUBMED entries while the\u00a0“Journal of Allergy”[Jour] has only 157 entries\u00a0so far. Is this an\u00a0“intention to deceive authors and readers”?
\nThe most recent issue appears as of “Epub 2014 Apr 6”, the first one as “Epub 2009 Jul 2”, so the company\u00a0basically publishing 2-3 papers per month.
\nThe\u00a0Pubmed Analyzer<\/a>\u00a0are not very informative here. The whole “Journal of Allergy” has accumulated only 135 citations in the past 5 years\u00a0(not an impressive figure as I have authored more than a dozen single papers that have received all\u00a0more citations than the whole journal).
\nThe extreme low citation rate and the missing impact factor may not be taken as an indicator<\/a> that all papers are of poor quality\u00a0but raises serious doubts.
\nThe next question therefore is: Does the journal run\u00a0a\u00a0state of the art review process? The website list the following 24 scientists on the review board:<\/p>\n

William E. Berger, University of California, Irvine, USA
\nKurt Blaser, Universit\u00e4t Z\u00fcrich, Switzerland
\nEugene R. Bleecker, Wake Forest University, USA
\nJan de Monchy, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
\nFrank JP Hoebers, MAASTRO Clinic, The Netherlands
\nStephen T. Holgate, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
\nS. L. Johnston, Imperial College London, United Kingdom
\nYoung J. Juhn, Mayo Clinic, USA
\nAlan P. Knutsen, Saint Louis University, USA
\nMarek L. Kowalski, Medical University of Lodz, Poland
\nTing Fan Leung, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
\nClare M Lloyd, Imperial College London, United Kingdom
\nRedwan Moqbel, University of Manitoba, Canada
\nDesiderio Passali, University of Siena, Italy
\nStephen P. Peters, Wake Forest University, USA
\nDavid G. Proud, University of Calgary, Canada
\nFabienne Ranc\u00e9, CHU Rangueil, France
\nAnuradha Ray, University of Pittsburgh, USA
\nHarald Renz, Philipps University of Marburg, Germany
\nNima Rezaei, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Iran
\nRobert P. Schleimer, Northwestern University, USA
\nMassimo Triggiani, Universit\u00e0 degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Italy
\nHugo Van Bever, National University of Singapore, Singapore
\nGarry M. Walsh, University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Unfortunately this list is not identical to the editor names that are being listed directly on the PDFs\u00a0( eg\u00a0the academic editor RM<\/a>\u00a0is not being listed at the web front).\u00a0The \u00a0above editor list includes indeed some well respected scientists but there are also\u00a0others that show their Hindawi affiliation as their first hit on Google only.\u00a0As I know 7 of the 24 persons, I decided to email them a short 6 item questionnaire via Surveymonkey.<\/p>\n

When did you start your role as an editor?
\n2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014
\n2. What is your role there?
\nLeading editor- supervising associate editors
\nEditor – assigning papers to reviewes, holding final decision Reviewer – reading and scoring papers
\nSonstiges (bitte angeben)
\n3. How many papers have you been dealing with?
\n0,\u00a01,\u00a02,\u00a03,\u00a04,\u00a05 or more
\n4. How many papers did you accept?
\nnearly none, about half, most,\u00a0all
\n5. Are you being paid for that work?
\nno,\u00a0yes,\u00a0don’t want to tell
\n6. Is this a serious journal?
\nno,\u00a0yes,\u00a0don’t know<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

2 of my 24 emails bounced-\u00a0some of the members of the editorial board are already retired.
\n19 did not respond. I believe they will show the same behaviour\u00a0when being addressed by Hindawi.
\n1 editor sent me a personal email saying that he will resign from the board. It will be interesting to see when the list of editors\u00a0will be changed, I already started a change detection.
\n<\/a>3 editors answered the mini survey: Editor #1 started in 2010, has been dealing with more than 5 papers, accepted most, is not paid and believes it is a serious journal. Editor #2 \u00a0started in 2009 with all other responses being identical. \u00a0Editor #3 started also in 2009 but accepts only half of the papers.
\n<\/span>It doesn’t come unexpected that these 3 motivated editors believe in a regular review process. I fear, however,\u00a0that\u00a0most editors either do not work for the journal (anymore) or are not motivated to spend even 3 minutes for\u00a0the quality control of their work.
\n<\/span>Without any transparent review process like that at the BMC journals, we can not judge from the outside if there is any review process. The names of the individual reviewers are unknown, and even contacting the authors would not help as they don’t have an interest to reveal that they get a paper published without any review process.<\/span><\/p>\n

As a library one could order printed copy ( e.g. 20 articles per year for $395 ) although I could not locate any library in the world that has any subscription to this journal.
\nAs an author I would be charged $800 per PDF.\u00a0There seems to be no major text editing included in the publication process, what\u00a0you get for your $800 is a\u00a0quickly reformatted text, a PUBMED entry and\u00a0a PDF\u00a0sitting at a\u00a0cloud server for\u00a0an unknown storage time. My estimate for that service is $10.<\/span><\/p>\n

Declan Butler developed a check list of serious publishers and journals. So we can now use that check list to judge this journal.<\/p>\n

Check that the publisher provides full, verifiable contact information, including address, on the journal site. Be cautious of those that provide only web contact forms.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

FAILED (PARTIALLY)<\/p>\n

Check that a journal’s editorial board lists recognized experts with full affiliations. Contact some of them and ask about their experience with the journal or publisher.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

FAILED (PARTIALLY)<\/p>\n

Check that the journal prominently displays its policy for author fees.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

PASSED<\/p>\n

Be wary of e-mail invitations to submit to journals or to become editorial board members.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

FAILED (SPAMMER)<\/p>\n

Read some of the journal’s published articles and assess their quality. Contact past authors to ask about their experience.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

FAILED (POOR QUALITY)<\/p>\n

Check that a journal’s peer-review process is clearly described and try to confirm that a claimed impact factor is correct.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

FAILED (NO IMPACT)<\/p>\n

Find out whether the journal is a member of an industry association that vets its members, such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org) or the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (www.oaspa.org).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

PASSED<\/p>\n

Another set of guidelines for fake journals is\u00a0available at Wikipedia<\/a>. Complaints that are associated with predatory open-access publishing include<\/p>\n

Accepting articles quickly with little or no peer review or quality control, including hoax and nonsensical papers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

CAN NOT BE DECIDED YET<\/p>\n

Notifying academics of article fees only after papers are accepted.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

FALSE<\/p>\n

Aggressively campaigning for academics to submit articles or serve on editorial boards.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

TRUE<\/p>\n

Listing academics as members of editorial boards without their permission, and not allowing academics to resign from editorial boards.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

UNCLEAR<\/p>\n

Appointing fake academics to editorial boards.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

FALSE<\/p>\n

Mimicking the name or web site style of more established journals.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

TRUE<\/p>\n

Verdict: The journal does not pass the\u00a0Butler criteria of a scientific journal.<\/p>\n

Comment: I do not see any major problem if an open access journal is\u00a0publishing all manuscripts it receives, leaving the final decision of being good or bad science to a\u00a0post-publication review process. I see, however, a major problem if any\u00a0pre-publication review process is being assumed for Pubmed listed papers (and paid for) while being\u00a0never documented in a transparent way.<\/p>\n

Addendum: Change log editor page<\/a><\/p>\n\n

 <\/p>\n

\n CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 03.04.2026<\/span>\n <\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Being spammed by a company called Hindawi for many years, I tried to find out a bit more about one of their journals called “Journal of Allergy”. The website http:\/\/www.hindawi.com\/journals\/ja says Journal of Allergy is a peer-reviewed, open access journal that publishes original research articles, review articles, and clinical studies in all areas of allergy.\u00a0Journal … Continue reading Journal of Allergy<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9],"tags":[2875,2876,1927,2873,2550,248,2874,1485,1185],"class_list":["post-7035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asthma-allergy","category-computer-software","tag-beall-list","tag-butler-criteria","tag-bad-science","tag-control","tag-fake","tag-journal","tag-peer","tag-quality","tag-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7035"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7228,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7035\/revisions\/7228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}