In the Dark

It’s been a while since I reported on a couple of encounters with predatory publishers so I thought I’d do another post in the same vein. Just this morning I received an email:

The email is in Polish, followed by the above translation into English. Out of curiosity I had a look at the website for UK Zhende Publishing. Imagine my lack of surprise when I found out it was down! The company is however registered at Companies House. Mr Zihan Li – who is resident in China -owns 75% of the business.

The Open Journal of Astrophysics is not for sale under any circumstances, not that I own it anyway. I did toy with the idea of selling them some other journal I don’t own, but I’m too busy to play such games. I did, however, find the time to reply giving my “thoughts/comments” as requested, though it would be inappropriate to repeat them here.

The last time I received such an approach ( a few months ago) the suggested price was $70,000. I see it has now gone up to $100,000. I don’t know how Mr Zihan arrived at a valuation of $100K but it got me thinking. We have so far published 149 articles at OJAp. Taking the APC for MNRAS of £2500 (approximately $3000) as typical then we have saved the community about $447,000 in unnecessary publication charges.

This entry was posted on May 9, 2024 at 1:14 pm and is filed under Open Access with tags Open Access Publishing, Open Journal of Astrophysics, Predatory Publishers, UK Zhende Publishing.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.