The gall of some "publishers"

Image source: IEEE.

On 25 May 2015, I received an unsolicited offer from a publisher I'd never heard of before, David Publishing*.  You can see that email here, and right at the bottom, you can see my very blunt reply to them.  I found Beall's List of Predatory Publishers years ago, and have come to depend on it as one of the best sources of information about the growing trend of scammers and spammers in the academic publishing field.  David Publishing is on Beall's List, and that's good enough for me.

(The original message source with all headers is here, not that it will make sense to you since the message is uuencoded probably because it was originally written in a non-ISO-Latin-1 language.)

What made me wonder about David Publishing?  Well, here's a few problems I had with that email:

• real publishers have well-structured email, with good use of formatting;
• real publishers get my gender, title, and/or rank correct;
• real publishers invest in proper translation services;
• real publishers make direct and specific links between their services and what they're hoping you will offer them;
• real publishers will provide a full and real contact name for their representative;
• real publishers do not appear on Beall's List.

The email I received didn't meet any of these criteria.

So I told 'em to fuck off.

I also created an email filter to immediately delete any future messages from the davidpublisher.com domain.

But that's not good enough for them - so now these losers are trying to convince me of their legitimacy.  Today, I found this message in my inbox (original source here), which again seems to be utter bullshit, because:

• the language of the english text is extremely poor;
• the included message allegedly attributed to Jeffrey Beall is lacking in actual source, and if one goes to Beall's website, one finds the actual page describing the appeals process - a process completely different from what is advertised; 
• searching for text fragments of the complaint against Beall (e.g., this one or this one) yields not one result on a reputable source of information about academic publishing; and
• searching for the names of those who apparently wrote against Beall yields results like this one, containing unsubstantiated 3rd party copy-and-paste jobs (read the comments on that post to see what I mean).

So I'll be creating a new email filter, to automatically delete messages from davidpublishing.org too. And I advise everyone to do likewise.

And as for David Publishing?  Fuck 'em.

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* I linked to this site using DoNotLink, so don't worry about giving them traffic by following this link.