I recently received the following invitation in an e-mail from mjmms@masaumnet.com:
Dear Colleague
I am glad to invite you as Guest Editor of MASAUM Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences for year 2012. If you are interested to join us as guest editor, please send us following information ASAP.
Full Name with Title :
Designation:
Affiliation:
City & Country:
Email:
Area of Interest in Research:
Latest Picture (optional):
You are further invited to submit you valuable work for the first issue of the journal. Submission deadline is Jan 05, 2012.
Your earlier and positive response will be highly appreciated.
Managing Editor
MJMSS
It struck me as strange that someone would consider me so important as to qualify to be a guest editor of his journal, yet needed me to send him my name. The reason is obvious: this message was probably spammed to thousands (or more) of my colleagues.
As readers of this blog may know, publishers like this are one of my pet peeves. So I investigated a bit. What I found was entertaining. The publisher's homepage is www.masaumnet.com. There one learns that "MASAUM Network has a good team of well repute Professors..." but evidently cannot afford to hire someone with the ability to write a grammatically correct sentence in English. As I expected, the publisher has an online-only, "Open Access" model that really means author-pay. The cost to publish an article is not terribly high ($200), although in a bizarre twist the price depends on the number of pages (shouldn't it depend on the number of MB?) Even more entertaining is the fact that their instructions for authors state
Paper submissions are accepted only in Doc format. Other formats will not be accepted.
That alone guarantees they will not get any serious mathematics submissions.
Today, I received the following highly alarming message:
Dear Colleague
I am glad to inform you that information about you has been added at
www.masaumnet.com/ebmjmss.html.
Please check and confirm information displayed about you.
If correction is needed ,let us know about it.
If information about you has been missing ,please send us following information about you
ASAP.
Full Name with Title :
Designation:
Affiliation:
City & Country:
Email:
Area of Interest in Research:
Latest Picture (optional):
You are further invited to submit you valuable work for the first issue of the journal.
Submission deadline is Jan 15, 2012.
Please forward this to concerned persons.
Your earlier and positive response will be highly appreciated.
shiella Nancy
Chief Coordinator
on the behalf of
Managing Editor
MJMMS
At this point, I myself was a "concerned person"! So I followed the link and breathed a sigh of relief when I realized that my name does not appear anywhere on the page it leads to. I've let them know in no uncertain terms that they are not authorized to use my name.
