Hi everyone,
I recently got some linkedin messages asking me for an article of some sort to publish in a journal.
No communication was done outside of linkedin which I find strange. Second of all they want to charge me 1500 euros to publish this article. Now he keeps messaging me that they are still waiting for my response (it's been like a week).
Now, I am not entirely familiar with publishing but I feel like it's a scam. I found this blog post about the journal:
https://www.emeraldcityjournal.com/2015/12/watch-out-for-insight-medical-publishing-imedpub-www-imedpub-com/
What do you think?
Dear Melissa van Rijnen ,
Welcome to "the world of predatory publishing” (see for more general background information for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_publishing). Thanks to the increasing power of internet and availability of good software it is nowadays extremely easy to set-up a website that pretty much look like a genuine scientific journal/publisher while they're not. There are many fraudsters out there. One initiative that tried to address this serious problem was Jeffrey Beall, who set up a list that is nowadays simply known as the Beall’s list (https://beallslist.net/ ).
Indeed “Insight Medical Publishing (iMedPub)” is an example of a predatory publisher (mentioned in the Beall’s list https://beallslist.net/). Even if one is not familiar with the Beall’s list there are numerous red flags like:
-They are part of OMICS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMICS_Publishing_Group) one of the most notorious predatory publishers around
-Looking at their misleadingly professionally looking website (https://www.imedpub.com/ ) the contact info (https://www.imedpub.com/contact.php) mentions a UK address that when you Google it, turns out to be some pretty nice looking estate but has nothing to do with a real office (in other words why hide your true origin)
-None of their journals has any serious indexing like Scopus index (see enclosed file where you will not find any journal owned by iMedPub that is listed, they only one mentioned “Translational Biomedicine” is discontinued already since 2015)
It is sad but part of reality: there are criminals out there trying to mislead you.
Best regards.
It is not impossible that a legitimate journal might use LinkedIn to solicit manuscripts, but this sounds like a predatory practice.
Reply that you are not interested. If they continue to harass you, block them.
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