It’s been a while since I reported on a couple of encounters with predatory publishers so I thought I’d do another post in the same vein. Just this morning I received an email:
The email is in Polish, followed by the above translation into English. Out of curiosity I had a look at the website for UK Zhende Publishing. Imagine my lack of surprise when I found out it was down! The company is however registered at Companies House. Mr Zihan Li – who is resident in China -owns 75% of the business.
The Open Journal of Astrophysics is not for sale under any circumstances, not that I own it anyway. I did toy with the idea of selling them some other journal I don’t own, but I’m too busy to play such games. I did, however, find the time to reply giving my “thoughts/comments” as requested, though it would be inappropriate to repeat them here.
The last time I received such an approach ( a few months ago) the suggested price was $70,000. I see it has now gone up to $100,000. I don’t know how Mr Zihan arrived at a valuation of $100K but it got me thinking. We have so far published 149 articles at OJAp. Taking the APC for MNRAS of £2500 (approximately $3000) as typical then we have saved the community about $447,000 in unnecessary publication charges.
