Sunday, November 26, 2017

SciHuβ's "American Journal of ..."

Sci-Hub is best known as a pirate site for scientific papers. Articles on its spectacular success in this regard -- and the lawsuits against it by Elsevier and ACS -- have appeared in Nature, Atlantic, Wikipedia, the blog TorrentFreak, and elsewhere. The site co-opts university library servers to reach behind "paywalls." There is a Robin Hood quality to the site's founder and function that has garnered support, the blatant illegality notwithstanding.

In the original version of this posting, I wrote that
It also has six online journals of its own, named "American Journal of ... " The American Journal of Biotechnology and Molecular Sciences has no editorial board (11/26/17). Ditto for the American Journal of Medical and Dental Sciences. Its "current issue" is from 2013. The American Journal of Social and Management Sciences has more than 50 editors and no editor-in-chief. Only a handful are in America. They are
Stan Weeber, Ph.D., McNeese State University, (There is such a Professor of Sociology at McNeese State U., which proudly reports that "he received a Certificate in Social Justice Studies from the Oxford Roundtable at Oxford University." The Oxford Roundtable is not affilated with Oxford University and apparently awards certificates to anyone who will come to its conferences.)
Tetsuji Yamada, Ph.D., Rutgers University (an economist who is an editor-in-chief of journals for OMICS and Sciforschen as well).
⊗ Dr. Sohail Mahmood, Independent Political Analyst (the author of at least six books on Pakistan),
Moustafa Abu EL Fadl, Ph. D., Old Dominion University (not listed in the university directory, but he received his Ph.D. there and is a visiting assistant professor at Clark University).
A reader pointed out that these journals are not associated with Sci-Hub -- that they are run by someone else using the name Science Huβ (for the homepage at https://scihub.org). The domain name is registered to Science Hub, LLC, P. O. Box 3423, Milford, Connecticut 06460, with the phone number (724)909-0482 and email url email@scihub.org.

2 comments:

  1. Now I 'm wondering whether to read the last character in "Science Huβ" as a Beta, or as a German 'ss' symbol.

    You had me worried for a moment that there might be a genuine connection between the Sci-hub site and this new "scihub" scammer.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Science Huβ and SciHub are different entities.

      Delete