Not all Open Access publications are good. Some are basic Nigerian scams, and I don’t mean that as a figment of speech, some literally are scams run out of Nigeria. They ask for money and will publish anything. Interestingly just yesterday it appears that some pseudoscientists got scammed, Scam Publisher Fools Swedish Cranks. There is even a list of predatory journals, which appears to be down at the moment but here is a link to a copy of the list of predatory open access journals, with discussion on the different types of scams.
Traditionally these predatory publishers spam professional mailing lists but now it looks like they are branching out to blog spaming. For the last few days I have been getting blog spam from one of the publishers on the list, OMICS Publishing Group. I am not hyperlinking to them and I will explain why. A way to boost ones page rank (how well you do in google search) is by links, well duh every knows that. What people don’t know is that one way of doing that is through commenting on blogs. A search bot will search the whole page and if you leave a comment and a link in the comment the bot will register that link as coming from that page. It is a sort of Trojan horse method for picking up links. Most comments are legitimate and someone who is willing to take the time to leave a comment should get some link juice.
OMICS, actually they have a bot doing it, is posting random, unrelated comments, about Open Access on any blog that has Open Access in the title. Here is one of there posts.
OMICS blog spam
It is on my post about Maney making some of their journals Open Access for a month. The comment has nothing to do with what I wrote and is basic blog spam. It is real sad to see this sort of thing going on as it makes a bad name for all Open Access publishers when Open Access is a great concept, at least the making content free part. I am not a big fan of outrageous prices charged by some publishers.
If you see a comment like this on your blog delete it. Do not give OMICS any better search rankings.
Jason Antrosio
April 13, 2012
Thank you, Doug, for tracking this down and putting out the alert. I had already marked these as spam on my own entries, but there are some other anthropology blogs that have been hit. I’ll forward this around.
dlende
April 13, 2012
Thanks for update on this. Going to delete that comment now!
bcohen99
May 31, 2012
Take a look at “Beall’s List of Predatory Open Access Journals” now on FACEBOOK:
http://www.facebook.com/POA.Publishers
Dr. Ged
June 8, 2012
Hello, OMICS Group is not a spammer!! it sends out invitations to experts who wish to contribute to the open access community.
Doug Rocks-Macqueen
June 8, 2012
Yes, Yes it is. In a horrible horrible way. The screen shot it right there.
Anonymous
December 6, 2012
OMICS Group Comferences are a SCAM
You are invited to speak, but have to pay for registration.
They ask for multiple payments, claiming they didn’t get it.
Hotel has no record of the conference.
Couldn’t get in touch with organizers after they got the money, except by phone to someone who said they would get back to me but never did (multiple times).
Luckily I canceled beforehand, but of course no refunds.
Avoid OMICS Conferences!
Anonymous
February 25, 2013
Hi. I have just had an invitation to deliver a keynote at an OMICS conference and suspected it to be either a scam or a waste of time, based on what I’d read about predatory publishing. Which conference were you invited to and by whom?
Howard Katz
February 25, 2013
Google “OMICS scam”
anonymous
January 19, 2013
OMICS IS A SCAM. AVOID EVERYTHING ABOUT THEM. REPORT THEM TO THE FTC IF YOU HAVE A COMPLAINT
Anonymous
March 19, 2013
Now I know why the person I spoke with over the phone was so rude. He kept calling me “Doctor” and when I told him I was not a doctor, he said, “is there anything wrong with me calling you doctor?” and he still continued in his heavy (sounded like indian/paki) accent. He was then willing to accept the payment for $300 to “reserve” the seat for a conference. When I said this is for a sister of mine who is in a Pharmacy program, he said “OH GOD!”
very unprofessional and I have no idea how can someone go to their “conferences”
Now that I know they are a scam, I will continue to warn people about them.