I received this email which provides free QUVAE Professsional Membership Certificate that offers:
1) Opportunity as a reviewer in Scopus Q1 Journal
2) Opportunity to be a webinar speaker
3) Access to research webinars
4) Discount in Scopus publication, proofreading, international conference & free plagiarism check
Anyone have experience or a member of this?
Dear Terence Yew Chin Tan,
First some general remarks. If you Google a search term like “journal publication support services” you end up with a long list of agencies, services. Besides using their own publishing services publishers are (understandably) not fond of using third party services/companies involved in the scientific writing of the paper see for example https://www.springeropen.com/get-published/editorial-policies where they write things like “To discourage ghost authorship, corresponding authors must reveal as appropriate whether the manuscript benefited from the use of editorial services that, if unacknowledged, might constitute an undisclosed conflict of interest.” and “The involvement of scientific (medical) writers or anyone else who assisted with the preparation of the manuscript content should be acknowledged, along with their source of funding, as described in the European Medical Writers Association (EMWA) guidelines. The role of medical writers should be acknowledged explicitly in the ‘Acknowledgements’ or ‘Authors’ contributions’ section as appropriate.”
Back to QUVAE (https://www.quvae.com/membership ) I see disturbing things:
-No transparency about the costs for those who decide to use the services of this company
-How can you become a reviewer for a Scopus journal? This is not the way it (should) go(es). The journal select peer reviewers and the author most of the times can suggest peer reviewers. So it is the other way around
-Their business model is completely unclear (I mean offering all sorts of discounts while it is completely unclear how they generate income)
-Offering students discounts when publishing in a Scopus journal means that the student pays the APC charged by the journal and Quvae returns 20%??? Highly vague how this is possible and how this company generates money (unless the student pays them, and the APC is waived by some trick by this company???)
-I think this is only possible if this company use (a fake?) mail address to suggest towards the journal that they are dealing with the corresponding author. This is to say the least misleading
-Or do they include an author to the potential paper who is willing to pay the costs?
-It looks to me that this way of operating facilitates paper mill practices or stronger it might be a paper mill operating in disguise
Personally, I would not trust this way of operating. Becoming a member give some kind of credibility to these practices I personally would stay away from, but again this is my personal opinion.
Best regards.
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