Snatching Indexed Journals
More journals are grabbed and converted to soulless OA doppelgangers
In late January, a preprint appeared on Zenodo. but it was more like journalism than anything else, which is fine with me. The findings are well-documented, with screenshots and emails, and they correlate with other reporting and facts.
Often, a good journalistic analysis is more than enough to uncover a real problem.
Entitled, “Invasion of the journal snatchers: How indexed journals are falling into questionable hands,” the preprint covers a long-term trend of sketchy companies acquiring journals in order to flip them to fast-money APC-based OA journals.
In one instance, we learn about a company called Oxbridge Publishing House, Ltd., and how it has been using a complex network of interrelated businesses to acquire dozens of indexed journals from numerous countries in order to flip these OA and drive up the number of papers being published in each, obviously to make a quick buck.
Oxbridge is a portmanteau of Oxford and Cambridge, but the company has nothing to do with either town or any university the name might bring to mind. The company is located in an 1879 mansion in Solihull, in southeast Birmingham.
The financial gambit at Oxbridge and others seems to have a few obvious components, all based on exploiting the APC model: