Not all Open Access publications are good. Some are basic Nigerian scams, and I don’t mean that as a figment of speech, some literally are scams run out of Nigeria. They ask for money and will publish anything. Interestingly just yesterday it appears that some pseudoscientists got scammed, Scam Publisher Fools Swedish Cranks. There is even a list of predatory journals, which appears to be down at the moment but here is a link to a copy of the list of predatory open access journals, with discussion on the different types of scams.
Traditionally these predatory publishers spam professional mailing lists but now it looks like they are branching out to blog spaming. For the last few days I have been getting blog spam from one of the publishers on the list, OMICS Publishing Group. I am not hyperlinking to them and I will explain why. A way to boost ones page rank (how well you do in google search) is by links, well duh every knows that. What people don’t know is that one way of doing that is through commenting on blogs. A search bot will search the whole page and if you leave a comment and a link in the comment the bot will register that link as coming from that page. It is a sort of Trojan horse method for picking up links. Most comments are legitimate and someone who is willing to take the time to leave a comment should get some link juice.
OMICS, actually they have a bot doing it, is posting random, unrelated comments, about Open Access on any blog that has Open Access in the title. Here is one of there posts.
OMICS blog spam
It is on my post about Maney making some of their journals Open Access for a month. The comment has nothing to do with what I wrote and is basic blog spam. It is real sad to see this sort of thing going on as it makes a bad name for all Open Access publishers when Open Access is a great concept, at least the making content free part. I am not a big fan of outrageous prices charged by some publishers.
If you see a comment like this on your blog delete it. Do not give OMICS any better search rankings.
