trail goes cold

Nicole forwarded the warning note to me.

From:  *Phil Groff* 

Date:  Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 11:00 AM
Subject:  A warning to pass along to our contributors!

To:  James E, Nicole M, Paul G, Allendria B

To all our editors and contributors,

I am writing to provide a warning.  One of our contributing editors at the Journal has recently received a solicitation to submit articles and to join the editorial board of a publication called The American Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics.  You should be aware that this journal in particular and it's parent company Science Publishing Group are widely considered to be examples of the emerging trend of predatory publishing, which Wikipedia defines as an "exploitative academic publishing business model," marked by such features as absent or minimal quality control such as peer review, minimal or no qualifications for editorial board membership, and frequently, fees charged to authors for publication of their materials.  What's particularly worrisome in this case is that the solicitation included specific reference to an article that our author had published in the RASC Journal, and thus was targeted in a quite specific and sophisticated way.

Please be cautious about any such solicitations you receive.  Submitting articles to such a venue will do nothing to improve your c.v. and may end up costing you some money as well as time and reputation.  We would hate to see any of our RASC contributors exploited by such a scheme, based on good work they had done for the Society.

To read more about predatory publishing, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_publishing

and to read more about Science Publishing Group in particular, see:

https://scholarlyoa.com/science-publishing-group-a-complete-scam/

Clear skies!
Phil

OK. This shows the ED sent the note to the editors. But then the trail goes cold... As far as I can tell, no message was sent to the Journal contributors. I never received this.

Sad, because this is where it all started!

Why do we have communication problems in this day and age...

I'm not following up as I will be viewed (probably already am) as grumbly and complainy. If I try to dig any deeper, I'll get push-back. It's happened before and I don't need to go there again. I've done what I think I should do.

I sure hope no one gets hooped. If it happens, it'll be a "I told ya so" moment.

That's about RASC internal issues. 

Blog readers? If you submit papers to journals or scientific institutions, this is a caution. A courtesy message to be aware of solicitations for your work. Do your homework. Use trusted sources.