Dear Colleagues,
Have any of you been contacted by an open-access publisher called David Publishing? I received an email from them several months ago about publishing a very old article in an anthology, which I turned down after looking into their operation. They often ask for an author fee and transfer copyright. Recently they contacted me about publishing a conference presentation, and got a bit testy when I did not respond. I had to ask them to take me off the list.
I regularly get invited to conferences in China in areas in which I have zero expertise: chemistry, management, and so on. Back in the days when I thought this was simply a mistake, I could contact the group and explain what I do. They invariably insisted that I was the person they want. According to friends in the sciences, they can find themselves as keynote speakers without having agreed to give a talk, or on editorial boards of journals in cases where they have never agreed to serve. I wonder if the editorial boards of David Publishing also are fake.
I found this website about David Publishing: https://scholarlyoa.com/2015/10/15/david-publishing-company-a-massive-spammer-from-china/
Does anyone know more about this operation? And, is there any way to lodge a formal protest against these faux-academic publishing operations?
Wendy Larson <walarson@uoregon.edu>