Bentham Science Publishers

Bentham Science Publishers
Founded 1994
Country of origin United Arab Emirates
Headquarters location Sharjah
Publication types Scientific journals, e-books
Official website benthamscience.com

Bentham Science Publishers is a company that publishes scientific, technical, and medical journals and e-books. It publishes 140 subscription-based academic journals[1] and over 60 open access journals.[2] It is based at Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates,[1] and has operating units in the United States, Japan, China, India, and the Netherlands. The company workforce is outsourced to China, India, Japan [3] and Pakistan.[1]

Bentham Open, its open-access branch, has received some criticism for its questionable peer-review practices, and was listed as a "potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publisher" in Jeffrey Beall's list of Predatory Publishers. [4]

Publishing divisions

Bentham Science has three main operating divisions: subscription-based journals, open access titles, and e-books. They publish research literature in all areas of science, medicine, technology, humanities, and social sciences, which is available in both electronic and print versions.

Bentham Science publishes more than 100 subscription-based journals in the fields of biotechnology, biomedical, pharmaceuticals, technology, engineering, computer and social sciences. These titles are indexed in Scopus, Chemical Abstracts, MEDLINE, EMBASE, PubsHub, etc.

Bentham Open Access published more than 150 peer-reviewed, free-to-view online journals under Bentham Open. This imprint was identified as a potential predatory publisher by Jeffrey Beall.[5] Bentham has since reduced it's roster to 60 open access journals in an effort to narrow the focus of it's operations and focus on the quality of it's OA publications.

Bentham eBooks publish text books, handbooks, monographs, biographies, autobiographies, conference proceedings and review volumes in the areas of medicine, technology, humanities, natural, and social sciences.

Controversies and criticism

Bentham Open journals claim to employ peer review;[6] however, a fake paper that was generated using SCIgen in 2009 that was accepted for publication has cast doubt on this. The publisher contended that that the paper was never published and that the acceptance was an attempt to catch the author who submitted the paper. [7] Another SCIgen generated fake paper was submitted to the Open Software Engineering Journal as part of the same operation -- this paper was rejected by the publisher after peer review.[8][9][10]

Bentham Open has been accused of spamming scientists with invitations to become members of the editorial boards of its journals.[11] These emails also had prompted the SCIgen paper submission to the journal.[9] The emails sent by Bentham included invitations to the editorial board of subjects where the recipient had no expertise.[9] In consequence, some editors quit the collaboration with Bentham.[8][10]

In 2009, the Bentham Open Science journal The Open Chemical Physics Journal published a study contending dust from the World Trade Center attacks contained "active nanothermite",[12] a well known 9/11 conspiracy theory. Following publication, the journal's editor-in-chief Marie-Paule Pileni resigned stating, "They have printed the article without my authorization… I have written to Bentham, that I withdraw myself from all activities with them".[13]

In a review of Bentham Open for The Charleston Advisor, Jeffrey Beall noted that "in many cases, Bentham Open journals publish articles that no legitimate peer-review journal would accept, and unconventional and nonconformist ideas are being presented in some of them as legitimate science." He concluded by stating that "the site has exploited the Open Access model for its own financial motives and flooded scholarly communication with a flurry of low quality and questionable research."[14] Beall has since added Bentham Open to his list of "Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers".[5]

In 2013, The Open Bioactive Compounds Journal was one of the journals that accepted an obviously bogus paper submitted as part of the Who's Afraid of Peer Review? sting.[15] It has since been discontinued.[16]

In a 2017 study of invitation spam by predatory publishers, Bentham Open was one of the most frequent invitation spammers.[17]

See also

  • Category: Bentham Science Publishers academic journals

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Bentham stays small for high impact". ACCESS – Asia's Newspaper on Electronic Information Product & Service (50). September 2004. Retrieved 2017-10-12.
  2. ↑ "Bentham Science - International Publisher of Journals and Books". Retrieved 2010-12-26.
  3. ↑ https://benthamscience.com/contacts.php
  4. ↑ Stuart Yeates (December 2017). "After Beall's List of predatory publishers: problems with the list and paths forward". Information Research. 2 (4).
  5. 1 2 Beall, Jeffrey. "List of publishers". Scholarly Open Access. Archived from the original on 2016-12-22. Retrieved 2014-12-28.
  6. ↑ "Bentham Open Home Page". Bentham Science Publishers Ltd. Archived from the original on 2010-07-27. Retrieved 2010-07-29.
  7. ↑ https://www.chronicle.com/article/Science-Publisher-Suggests-It/47768
  8. 1 2 "Chefredaktør skrider efter kontroversiel artikel om 9/11". Videnskab.dk (in Danish). Archived from the original on 2009-12-01. Retrieved 2010-07-29.
  9. 1 2 3 "CRAP paper accepted by journal – opinion – 11 June 2009". New Scientist. Retrieved 2010-07-29.
  10. 1 2 "Editors quit after fake paper flap". The Scientist. Retrieved 2010-07-29. /
  11. ↑ Some background on Bentham Open, but just some Peter Suber, Open Access News, April 24, 2008
  12. ↑ "Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe". Open Chemical Physics Journal. Archived from the original on 2012-07-10. Retrieved 2012-07-23.
  13. ↑ "Chefredaktør skrider efter kontroversiel artikel om 9/11". Vindeskab.dk. Retrieved 2012-07-23.
  14. ↑ Beall, Jeffrey (July 2009). "Bentham Open" (PDF). The Charleston Advisor. 11 (1): 29–32.
  15. ↑ "Data and Documents". 1 October 2016 – via www.sciencemag.org.
  16. ↑ "The Open Bioactive Compounds Journal".
  17. ↑ Clemons, Mark; Silva, Miguel de Costa e; Joy, Anil Abraham; Cobey, Kelly D.; Mazzarello, Sasha; Stober, Carol; Hutton, Brian (2017-02-01). "Predatory Invitations from Journals: More Than Just a Nuisance?". The Oncologist. 22 (2): 236–240. doi:10.1634/theoncologist.2016-0371. ISSN 1083-7159. PMC 5330713. PMID 28188258.
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