{"id":1064,"date":"2013-05-15T14:58:57","date_gmt":"2013-05-15T02:58:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/?p=1064"},"modified":"2013-08-30T15:40:33","modified_gmt":"2013-08-30T03:40:33","slug":"we-want-you-on-our-editorial-board","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/2013\/05\/15\/we-want-you-on-our-editorial-board\/","title":{"rendered":"We Want You On Our Editorial Board"},"content":{"rendered":"

An invitation to be on the editorial board of a journal can be a significant marker of academic prestige.\u00a0 If a subject-based journal can be seen to define a particular academic community then your name on the editorial board would suggest that you are a respected member of that community.\u00a0 This is a pretty well-recognised convention and editorial board membership is used in PBRF as evidence of peer esteem.
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\nA few years back university staff throughout the world began to receive emails from certain publishers asking them to join editorial boards of new journals, most of them Open Access titles \u2013 i.e. journals that do not charge subscriptions\u00a0 and are freely available to all Internet users, making their money by charging fees to authors instead.\u00a0 There was nothing unusual about this at the time, except that the volume of requests suddenly increased and people found that they were being approached by journals from disciplines quite unrelated to their own.\u00a0 Looking back, this was an early manifestation of the phony publishing phenomenon that has resulted in a flood of highly questionable material masquerading as published academic research onto the market.
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\nMost of the time this doesn\u2019t matter too much \u2013 the articles languish unread and uncited on the Internet and the only victims of this low-level fraud are the authors who paid money in the hope that their \u201cpublications\u201d would bring them attention and respect.\u00a0 Occasionally, however, one of these sharks sneaks through the safety net, such as the so-called Australian Journal of Basic and Applied Sciences<\/em> that was indexed by the Scopus database for two years<\/a>.\u00a0 In similar vein, most of the requests you are sent to join editorial boards probably won\u2019t make it through Massey\u2019s spam filters.\u00a0 For universities they are the equivalent of letters from the widows of Nigerian presidents, and the result is that when you try to access articles from some \u201cacademic journals\u201d they are blocked if you are on-campus because they come from spam-associated websites.\u00a0 Even when the occasional email sneaks through, they are generally pretty obvious for what they are \u2013 badly-spelled, clumsy, na\u00efve or hopelessly generic \u2013 but every now and then one of them will be more convincing and someone will get caught.<\/p>\n

So here are a few words of warning \u2013<\/p>\n