I was looking for a thread on Bentham Science Publishers on RG but could not find any.
I recently got an invitation fro the Current Environmental Engineering journal to act as a guest editor. In the email (see below), there was no mention of the group to which the journal belonged. I had to search the Internet for quite a while to eventually find it belonged to Bentham Science Publishers. This publisher appears to be quite questionable and Jeffrey Beall listed it as a potential predatory publisher.
Have you had any encounter with Current Environmental Engineering or Bentham Science Publishers yet? What do you think of them?
Thank you very much to you all for your valuable contributions which will benefit to us all.
Here is the email in question:
Current Environmental Engineering
23 August 2019
Dr. M. Ertz
LaboNFC
Universit du Qubec Chicoutimi
555
Boulevard de l\Universit
Canada
Dear Dr. Ertz,
Current Environmental Engineering (CEE), is in the process of appointing Executive Guest Editors. This journal publishes in all areas of environmental sustainability, disaster risk reduction and management, decision and policy making. We would like to propose your name for the position of Executive Guest Editor of Current Environmental Engineering.
Executive Guest Editors are appointed for a period of three years and are expected to submit a proposal for the first thematic issue in a hot and emerging field within 3 months. They are also expected to submit one thematic issue each subsequent year.
The peer review of the articles may be arranged by the guest editor, provided that the list of referees for each article is pre-approved by us. The reviewers should be neutral experts with H-index of above 15. The guest editor would be expected to provide us with at least two referee reports of each article. Publication of thematic issue would be facilitated by the use of our state- of- the- art, article processing system.
The Executive Guest Editors will be entitled to the following benefits:
If this position is of interest to you, please let us know. If you are interested, then kindly send us your brief CV and a list of your recent publications. Kindly also indicate the field of the journal relevant to your area of research.
In case you are not interested in the position of Executive Guest Editor, then you are welcome to submit a general article that fits in to the Aims and Scope of the journal.
We look forward to hearing from you in this regard.
Sincerely,
M. Alam
Director (Publications)
[If you prefer not to receive any further emails, please send us an email with the subject line “UNSUBSCRIBE”]
Dear Myriam Ertz ,
Bentham Science Publishers is a company that publishes journals and e-books and is based at Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, with numerous operating units in for example the United States, Japan and the Netherlands. Numerous Bentham Science journals have received JCR impact factors.
However they started an exclusively open-access branch: Bentham Open. This ‘Bentham’ has received criticism and was/is listed as a "potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publisher" in Jeffrey Beall's list of Predatory Publishers.
Bentham (Open) has become notorious of spamming scientists with invitations to become members of the editorial boards of its journals. Especially their relative young and not yet established journals use this ‘tactic’ of sending emails to researchers regardless whether their expertise corresponds to the scope of that particular journal.
Having said all this. New journals and publishers need to do their very best to get noticed, attract researchers to publish and gradually establish a name (and reputation). One cannot blame those who choose the more aggressive (marketing) strategy, similar like commercials (we all notice that companies either choose the well though, sometimes even funny or moving ones or they go for the annoying, often insulting our intelligence kind of commercials like those for washing powders and so on).
No matter whether you like their approach or not, Bentham Science Publishers seems to manage to get a substantial part of their journals in the right indexes (ESCI, SCI, Scopus, PubMed), although mostly moderate impact factors, and have been able to attract a number of well-established names to publish their work in their journals. Bentham Open is starting to get a number of their journals in serious indexes as well (ESCI, Scopus, PubMed).
So it hard to say whether it is good thing to get involved with this publisher or not. The ‘world’ is in need of more platforms/venues/services besides the big players like Elsevier and Springer Nature. Nowadays publishers of exclusively Open Access journals like MDPI, Plos, Frontiers and Hindawi are more and more established and it would not surprise me that at some point in time Bentham will be part of this as well.
Best regards.
Dear Rob Keller,
Thank you very much for your thorough and very balanced answer. You are raising some interesting points and I think these are all very relevant. I concur with you on the fact that conventional players are not sufficient outlets anymore especially with increasing amounts of research originating from developing (albeit already well-developed) countries. Hence, these OA players are establishing a new business model that answers a growing demand. Thanks your answer Rob, I feel that I am now in a better position to weigh the pros and cons of becoming an executive guest editor. Thanks again!
Kind regards.
Dear Rob Keller
I agree with you. In the last year, I have received emails from almost 10 journals, published by Bentham Science, asking me to be an editor or a guest editor. Some of these invitations were to journals that are away from my field of expertise and in which I have never published. This is one of their bad practices.
I have received an invitation from Open Environmental Research (new name for Open Ecology Journal). It is indexed by Scopus Environmental Science.
My understanding is that some bad practices are mixed with a developing policy. The question is: Are they predatory What is a predatory journal, publisher_ Is the Bell's list the only accepted reference_ I use to read this list. I guess that Bentham Publishers are at the very limit......are they becoming a reputed or a predatory publisher.....I have no clear evidence......but the fact that Scopus has indexed several of their Journals is a positive new.
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