I’ve recently found out about a call for papers that many QC email addresses received from The Journal of Arts and Humanities,  published by an entity calling itself the “Maryland Institute of Research.” This journal is bogus; it misrepresents itself in its promotional materials in order to charge high editing fees to authors.  There is an interesting blog post about this publisher here: http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/09/11/the-maryland-institute-of-research-from-bangladesh-2/.

I’d recommend avoiding contact with this journal.

Furthermore, we should all remember to carefully vet the journals in which we publish.  Some journals misrepresent themselves as scholarly, open access publications for nefarious purposes—and some commercial journals, too, are less than reputable.  There is a set of useful guidelines for evaluating potential publishers here: http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/11/30/criteria-for-determining-predatory-open-access-publishers-2nd-edition/

This shouldn’t scare anyone away from open access publishing in general; there are many excellent publishers out there.  However, you need to stay on your toes when responding to calls for papers.

I’d be happy to answer any questions you have about this.

Nancy M. Foasberg

Humanities Librarian

348 Rosenthal Library

Queens College, CUNY

nfoasberg@qc.cuny.edu

718-997-3751