You know an academic field has come to full maturity when the null results come rolling in. But you really know an academic discipline has come to maturity when the first shady academic journals pop up. Enter “E-Health Telecommunication Systems and Networks” from Scientific Research Publishing (love their description “An Academic Publisher“!).
An invitation mail mass-spam just popped into my spam e-mail box alongside invitations to submit to other “rapid peer review and publishing” journals with names that range from could-be reputable (‘British Journal of Medicine and Medical Research’) to downright weird. The basic premise of these journal is well-known to me as a musician: the much-maligned ‘pay-to-play‘ principle has many a musician grunting (ha!) and complaining – it looks like the pay-to-publish racket is not very different.
Should you send an eHealth-related manuscript to these people? Is Scientific Research Publishing a predatory journal? Who knows. But the word on the virtual streets is not good. And a company publishing 200+ English-language journals in just over 6 years is ambitious, to say the least. Oh yes, and they gladly accepted a randomly generated maths paper (read: total bullshit) for publication after a mere 10 days of review – only the lead ‘author’ didn’t pony up the processing charges.
Long story short, if you want to publish your eHealth-related manuscript in one of my 666+ Bottom Of The Barrel Research Publishing Co. journals, just send me the manuscript and $2000. I’ll personally do some ‘peer-reviewing’. Or do it the boring old way and send your eHealth-related manuscript to reputable academic journals like the Journal of Medical Internet Research, Internet Interventions or the Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare.