Tag: 5. April 2008

Date: Sat, 5 Apr 2008 09:31:07 -0500
From: [deleted]
Subject: Re: Fwd: Bentham Science Publishers

I don’t know if this is relevant but it sounds like it might be. This email is
several weeks old:

>From Scope Knowledge today:

Wiley-Blackwell, the STM and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley
& Sons, Inc., US, and STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, have alerted
authors against an e-mail spam through their respective websites.

An e-mail message, circulated last week, sought manuscript submissions
for peer-reviewed journals and claimed to come from Blackwell
Publishing. It called for articles ‘in all fields of human endeavor,’
and said that the editors would decide on which journal it should appear
in. The message, which came from a http://gmail.com address, requested
manuscripts be sent to someone at http://live.com.

A similar message was circulated a few months ago asking for manuscripts
for Elsevier journals. People who responded to the message were asked to
send money for a handling fee. An investigation conducted by Elsevier
traced the e-mail to an Internet cafe in Nigeria. In response to the
Elsevier scam, the International Association of Science, Technical and
Medical Publishers also placed a warning on its website.

Wendy

Dr. Wendy A. Warr
Wendy Warr & Associates
6 Berwick Court, Holmes Chapel
Cheshire, CW4 7HZ, England
Tel./fax +44 (0)1477 533837

wendy — http://warr.com http://www.warr.com

———- Forwarded message ———-
Date: Sat, 5 Apr 2008 11:23:18 +0100
From: Richard Poynder
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM — http://LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Bentham Science Publishers

Dear All,

I would be grateful if anyone could help me. I am interested in an Open
Access publisher called Bentham Science Publishers
(http://www.bentham.org). I have been contacted by a number of researchers
who say that the company is bombarding them with invitations to contribute
papers to its journals. Apparently requests by the recipients to remove them
from Bentham’s mailing list have little or no effect.

I have tried to make contact with a number of people in the company
including Richard Scott, who is most often the person whose name appears at
the bottom of the invitation letters, and was until recently listed as the
editorial director of the company on its web site
(http://www.bentham.org/Contact.php). I also copied into my emails Bentham’s

US contact Richard Morrissey, and Matthew Honan, who earlier this year was
also described as the company’s editorial director
(http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/01/bentham-oa-publishing-program.html).
Likewise I copied in Professor Thomas Salt, since he too has signed
some of the offending emails in his capacity as Editor-in-Chief of a Bentham
journal called Current Neuropharmacology. Tom Salt appears to be based in
the Department of Visual Science at the Institute of Ophthalmology in
London.

Despite all my attempts to make email contact with the company and its
representatives, however, the only response I have received has come from

someone called Mahmood Alam who seems to be based in Pakistan. He informed
me that Richard Scott was too busy to speak with me, but invited me to email
my questions to him. After I sent some questions through to Mahmood Alam,
however, he failed to answer them.

I have also tried calling the telephone numbers listed on the Bentham web

site, but have only been able to get through to voice mail messages. The
number listed for Richard Morrissey simply invites callers to email him (the
address given is the one that I have failed to get any response from).

I would be most grateful if anyone who has any knowledge of Bentham, or any
experience of publishing with the company, or editing any of its journals,
or anyone who regularly reads any of the Bentham journals, could contact me
on: richardpoynder1 — http://o2.co.uk.

Thank you.