Fraudulent message
The OMICS Group, through its Open Access Initiative, claims to make genuine and reliable contributions to the scientific community. It claims to host peer reviewed Open Access journals and to organize scientific conferences all over the world.
However, there are concerns that OMICS Group has unethical practices, including sending personal invitations to potential authors to submit manuscripts without informing them of the author fees, only to invoice them after their papers get quickly accepted. This was also reported in an article published by the Chronicle of Higher Education called “Predatory’ Online Journals Lure Scholars Who Are Eager to Publish”.
New evidence has surfaced revealing that OMICS, which is also in the business of organizing scientific conferences, has been 1) using the names of scientists, oftentimes without their permission, to invite participants to their meetings, 2) promoting their meetings by giving them names that are deceptively similar to other well-established meetings that have been held for years by scientific societies, and 3) refusing to refund registration fees, even if their meetings are cancelled.
OMICS has also established a separate brand called SciTechnol that operates much the same as OMICS.
Scholars are encouraged to avoid doing business in any way with the OMICS Group
More resources:
- Jeffrey Beall's blog 'Scholary Open Access', has an article entitled 'OMICS Goes from “Predatory Publishing” to “Predatory Meetings”' which goes into detail about the potential unethical practices.
- New York Times article 'Scientific Articles Accepted (Personal Checks, Too)'
- POPSCI article 'Bogus Academic Conferences Lure Scientists'