Talk:Hindawi (publisher)

Advertising

This is an advertising site. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hi pedler (talk • contribs) 01:38, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

This is advertising - see the use of the word 'our' and 'we' in the second paragraph - it was obviously written by the company.

I didn't write the article, and I have not the least connection with the company, so I removed the tag . However I do know about them, since they are referred to in many WP pages, there are lots of ghits, and I am therefore rewriting it. Speedy is for irremediable spam that could not be rewritten.

To add to the confusion there is another company caled Hindari, so the title will be changed to the full company name. DGG 22:46, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Journal lists

This is 2 lists masquerading as an encyclopedia article. At the very least, we don't need 2 lists when one is a subset of the other. I'm not sure whether to cut it with a big knife or a little knife. Nurg (talk) 03:17, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Cut the long list. Not needed. -134.131.125.49 (talk) 14:55, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Spam

Hindawi spam me a lot. Apparently I'm not the only one: http://www.google.com/search?q=hindawi+spam -- maybe someone who could be bothered to write a criticism section could gather the sources. 80.192.19.6 (talk) 07:01, 6 September 2011 (UTC)

They do spam a lot, but I couldn't find any "reliable source" talking about the problem to quote.--Per Abrahamsen (talk) 08:48, 7 September 2011 (UTC)

Guillaume2303 removed suggested removing the spam and other criticism section. While I normally would agree with him/her, in this case I think a blog post is acceptable. Here is why, the author of the blog post is an scholar/expert in the relevant field: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=EtHsEcMAAAAJ According to wikipedia standards: "Self-published expert sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established expert on the topic of the article whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable third-party publications" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability Of course, please correct me if I'm misreading the community standards..but I think I'm right here. Thanks. Pengortm (talk) 20:47, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

I was asked to comment, and I am not satisfied with the above sources. First of all, "spam" is being used in a particular sense, the invitation to contribute to the journals (and, of course, pay the fee). This ought to be made clear, because it is not all that easy to distinguish in borderline cases from normal requests for manuscripts.

I too use Beall's list for publishers I have never heard of. But he does not seem to discriminate between the more and less reputable publishers of the sort: of the ones he includes, Hindawi is probably the one whose quality compares most to conventional OA publication, but he doesn't indicate that. As Beall correctly says, the objection is not they they solicit publications, but that they publish too many journals at too great speeds to permit the degree of scholarly peer-review that they claim. I too consider this a problem, but I wouldn't call it spam. (In fact, I consider it less of a problem than I did at first, because the quality of some of these publishers, including Hindawi, has been no worse than many more conventional publishers. Perhaps I should say, less of a distinctive problem.) Inclusion on a list is not substantial criticism. I would regard a properly detailed and analytic article of his as a RS,

The lists posted by N. Christopher Phillips of the University of Oregon contain hundreds of detailed examples They include not only Hindawi, but such publishers as ISI, Thomson, Springer(for Acta Mathematica Sinica) , CRC, -- along with ads from VWR, Prentice-Hall, LSU, U Oregon, Wolfram, Math Soft, Broderbund, & Teach for America -- and along with the traditional Nigerian-type spam sites and obvious phishing sites. I conclude he cannot tell the difference between legitimate advertising and spam, I consider his opinions on the subject highly unreliable..

Kristensen's blog post seems to say that he would ordinarily regard the publication Hindawi asked him to contribute to as highly reputable. To my mind, this indicates exactly the blurring of boundaries. DGG ( talk ) 22:50, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Rajiv Sethi's excellent post mentions Hindawi, but does not indicate he thinks negatively of it, just that this manner of publishing raises potential problems . He's a RS on the economics of publishing,, but this posting does not support the material in the section.

I think there are btter discussions to be found. DGG ( talk ) 22:50, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for weighing in DGG. I've just edited my earlier changes in an effort to encompass your feedback---but of course hope you or others might improve upon this vein of thought. As a scholar, I know I would be highly skeptical of most publications in Hindawi journals and of people who publish in it. I suspect there are many others who have the same impression and that at some level this sense among the relevant public deserves to be noted in WP. As a side note, I do receive spam from them, although I would agree that on the spectrum of spammers, they are more legitimate than most--but still I don't know how I could get off of their email lists and am pretty sure they are trolling for my email address from publications like most spammers of academics. Of course we need more than these impressions to make a good WP article and these impressions might have biased my original modifications too much.Pengortm (talk) 00:02, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

• Having read now Beall's comments and the other cited blogs, I agree with DGG and think that the whole section should be removed until better references can be found. Beall's criticism is very mild ("do they have enough people to handle all those submissions to all those journals") and, frankly, I don't really understand it (it's the journals' editors that do all this work, not the publisher. Personally, as far as spamming is concerned, I don't count Hindawi among the journal spammers. There are much worse ones, that regularly send me articles to review for obscure journals in fields that are so far removed from my own that it becomes absolutely ridiculous and keep "inviting" me to contribute articles to those journals (and all those emails are obviously bulk emails). I get emails from Hindawi, too, but they at least invite me to contribute to journals that are in my field and even though I don't accept those invitations, I think such emails are legitimate. In short, I don't think that the sources given justify including a criticisms section and much better sources are needed before such a section would be justified. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 10:03, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

• Removed and posted below for others to try to improve upon to put back in at some point.Pengortm (talk) 15:53, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Criticisms

Hindawi has been placed on the Watchlist section of Beall's List of Predatory, Open-Access Publishers for exhibiting some characteristics of predatory open access journals (in particular, publishing so much that it is unclear they are maintaining quality standards.)

Hindawi uses unsolicited bulk emailing (sometimes considered spam) to market their journals .

Page charges

I've just reinserted the discussion of their use of page charges, previously deleted by user Guillaume2303 at this revision, who commented "we don't publish subswription [sic] rates either" in explanation; I'm not clear who 'we' are and don't see why this is in any way relevant. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mikalra (talk • contribs) 11:17, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

• "We" (i.e. Wikipedia) are not in the business of publishing prices for any products. We don't publish subscription rates for journals/magazines and there is no reason why we should do this differently for the cost of OA publishing. What's the next step: an article comparing these rates between different journals/publishers? Please read Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not. I'll revert yet again, please don't reinsert this unencyclopedic information. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 11:23, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

External links missing

It seems that the two links that should be directing to pdf documents at ithaka.org are outdated after Ithaka launched a new website. Using the search function on the new ithaka.org I was unable to retrieve any results for "hindawi", so I hope that someone more experienced than me might try to fix this problem? E.Wende (talk) 06:48, 30 August 2013 (UTC)