“Dear Doctor, greetings of the day!”:A 1-year observational study of presumed predatory journal invitations

Background: This study aimed at investigating the predatory publishing phenomenon in orthodontics by analyzing the content of unsolicited e-mail invitations received within 12 months.Methods: All electronic invitations for manuscript submission, review and editorial membership received between 1 October 2021 and 30 September 2022 were collected from an orthodontist’s inbox. The following data were recorded for each e-mail: date, journal title and origin, requested contribution, e-mail language, relevance to the researcher’s discipline, journal characteristics (claimed metrics, editorial services, article types accepted, and publication fees), journal/publisher contact information and online presence. Journal/Publisher legitimacy and publishing standards were evaluated by listing in the Beall’s list of potential predatory journals and publishers, the Predatory Reports of Cabell’s Scholarly Analytics, and the Directory of Open Access Journals.Results: A total of 875 e-mail invitations deriving from 256 journals were retrieved within the observation period, with most of them soliciting article submissions. More than 76% of the solicitations originated from journals and publishers included in the blocklists used in the study. Salient features of predatory journals like flattering language, abundant grammatical errors, unclear publication charges and wide variety of article types and topics accepted for publication were confirmed for the examined journals/publishers.Conclusions: Nearly 8 out of 10 unsolicited e-mail invitations sent to orthodontists for scholarly contribution may be related to journals suspicious for publishing malpractices and suboptimal standards. Excessive flattering language, grammatical errors, broad range of submissions, and incomplete journal contact information were commonly encountered findings. Researchers in orthodontics should be alert to the unethical policies of illegitimate journals and their harmful consequences on the scientific literature.</p

Guidelines for Organizing Art Exhibitions on Addiction and Recovery

Outlines the Innovators Combating Substance Abuse program's model for exhibiting art by those in addiction recovery as a way to offer insight into substance abuse and recovery. With lessons learned and submissions, selection, and installation guidelines

Characterizing Efficient Referrals in Social Networks

Users of social networks often focus on specific areas of that network, leading to the well-known "filter bubble" effect. Connecting people to a new area of the network in a way that will cause them to become active in that area could help alleviate this effect and improve social welfare. Here we present preliminary analysis of network referrals, that is, attempts by users to connect peers to other areas of the network. We classify these referrals by their efficiency, i.e., the likelihood that a referral will result in a user becoming active in the new area of the network. We show that by using features describing past experience of the referring author and the content of their messages we are able to predict whether referral will be effective, reaching an AUC of 0.87 for those users most experienced in writing efficient referrals. Our results represent a first step towards algorithmically constructing efficient referrals with the goal of mitigating the "filter bubble" effect pervasive in on line social networks.Comment: Accepted to the 2018 Web conference (WWW2018

A Decade of Editing the European Economic Review

This story describes the circumstances that led to all five of us starting as editors at the same time, the unexpected things we have found, the unanticipated reactions we have encountered, how we worked as an editorial team, the central role of the editorial office manager, how we managed to work with five different publishers in ten years, the various initiatives we have developed to involve associate editors and referees, the early electronic editing system, and the creation of the essential database of potential referees. We will also describe the difficulties we have encountered in reaching one of our early goals to reduce the median time of first response to less than four months. Along the way, we will share a few anecdotes to illustrate the work of an academic journal editor.

A Decade of Editing the European Economic Review

This story describes the circumstances that led to all five of us starting as editors at the same time, the unexpected things we have found, the unanticipated reactions we have encountered, how we worked as an editorial team, the central role of the editorial office manager, how we managed to work with five different publishers in ten years, the various initiatives we have developed to involve associate editors and referees, the early electronic editing system, and the creation of the essential database of potential referees. We will also describe the difficulties we have encountered in reaching one of our early goals to reduce the median time of first response to less than four months. Along the way, we will share a few anecdotes to illustrate the work of an academic journal editor.journal, editing, economics

Fewer invited talks by women in evolutionary biology symposia.

Lower visibility of female scientists, compared to male scientists, is a potential reason for the under-representation of women among senior academic ranks. Visibility in the scientific community stems partly from presenting research as an invited speaker at organized meetings. We analysed the sex ratio of presenters at the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) Congress 2011, where all abstract submissions were accepted for presentation. Women were under-represented among invited speakers at symposia (15% women) compared to all presenters (46%), regular oral presenters (41%) and plenary speakers (25%). At the ESEB congresses in 2001-2011, 9-23% of invited speakers were women. This under-representation of women is partly attributable to a larger proportion of women, than men, declining invitations: in 2011, 50% of women declined an invitation to speak compared to 26% of men. We expect invited speakers to be scientists from top ranked institutions or authors of recent papers in high-impact journals. Considering all invited speakers (including declined invitations), 23% were women. This was lower than the baseline sex ratios of early-mid career stage scientists, but was similar to senior scientists and authors that have published in high-impact journals. High-quality science by women therefore has low exposure at international meetings, which will constrain Evolutionary Biology from reaching its full potential. We wish to highlight the wider implications of turning down invitations to speak, and encourage conference organizers to implement steps to increase acceptance rates of invited talks

Improving the road planning process

Two Swedish road projects were studied to find ways to shorten the time spent in the road planning process. The results indicated that the road projects developed very differently. One planning project developed rather smoothly, while the other received an escalating flood of letters. Concerns about the environment and landscape were present in the majority of these letters, pointing to the importance of involving the expertise of landscape planners or environmentalists in the management of road development projects. This article's conclusion stresses the importance of inviting early submission of viewpoints and of responding to people's questions in order to achieve acceptance of a project; it also stresses the significance of keeping communication open with affected sectors of the public from the very beginning of a project

Linking authorship and reviewing activity in science publishing

Everybody wants to publish, but peers for review are increasingly hard to find. Online systems that help journal editors handle submissions indicate how many invitations for review a person accepted or declined. Linking this information automatically to the names of the first and last author of any submission to a specific journal, and displaying it during the online submission process, would make submitters aware of their own reviewing history with this journal, and make them aware that the journal editor will also be automatically informed about this. Editors might justifiably be less inclined to allow a manuscript into review if the authors have a history of declining review invitations. Additionally, offering both authors and editors a ranking opportunity in the online system as commonplace with any online business ('how do you rate this review?' - corrected for the type of decision that is rated) would make submitters aware of their reviewing performance, as well as editors - at the time when submitters might want to make the best of impressions with editors, i.e. during submission of their own manuscript. Rather than rewarding reviewing activity by quantifying it in metrics, such practice might enhance effort put into peer review

Guest editorial: Special issue on matching under preferences

No abstract available