Hilaris Publisher offers suggestions for improvisations

Would you trust the editing of your paper to an online publisher whose website speaks of an "editorial committee comprising reputed authors and academicians [who] offer their suggestions for improvisations, before getting them published finally"? If so, Hilaris SRL is the place to go. Its webpage banners proclaim that it is "Bringing Forth the Latest Scientific, Engineering and Medical Advancements to Limelight" and "Integrating Creativity and Knowledge for Enlightening Young Aspirants."

It is not surprising, then, that Hilaris made it onto Beall's list of predatory publishers and conference organizers. A search of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) whitelist returned only one Hilaris Journal and identified the publisher as based in Bulgaria. Hilaris's Contact Us" webpage has a Brussels "registered address." The domain names hilarispublisher.com, e-hilaris.com, and hilarisconferences.com are registered by a proxy rather than the actual owners.

A 2015 discussion of Hilaris on Research Gate produced the following observations:

• We submitted an article to a journal from the Hilaris group 3 months ago. They did not acknowledge receiving the manuscript and now they accepted it without any peer review and are charging a huge APC. ... --Mukulika Bose,University of North Carolina at Charlotte
• If you Google the journal's name you see OMICS links (if you click on them you are redirected to Hilaris). Looks like an attempt to cover up that OMICS is behind it, a notorious predatory publisher. Contact info is linked to eScience, iMed.Pub both mentioned in the Beall’s list.--Rob Keller, Charlemagne College, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
• We submitted an article in October, last year. After acceptance, we suspect the journal and decide to withdraw the submission, however they charged us almost 1000 euros with such a "withdrawal charge". We blocked them in the email. We also found out that one of the journal's directors has been dead for 2 years, he was a professor at an university in São Paulo state, Brazil.

A search of the ISSN portal for registration information on the The Journal of Forensic Research, ISSN: 2157-7145, confirms the link to the OMICS group (www.omicsonline.org/jfrhome.php; see also https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q27724675), widely known for its deceptive practices. The ISSN record claims the United States as the home of the Bulgarian-Belgian-Indian journal. Indeed, this blog has an entry devoted to this journal, and the Forensic Science, Statistics, and the Law blog notes that OMICS was the publisher when the journal was specifically included in an injunction secured by the FTC to stop its deceptive practices.

The editors-in-chief are supposed to be

• Dr. Jianye Ge, University of North Texas Health Science Center, Institute of Applied Genetics, USA
• Dr. Jian Tie, Assistant Professor, Department of Legal Medicine, Nihon University School of Medicine, Japan
• Dr. Sheila M Willis, Director, Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Forensic Science Laboratory, Ireland.

Actually, the designations for editors are inconsistent. One webpage lists Dr. Willis as an editor-in-chief, but another does not. Both have been said to be fraudulent. \1/ The latter page lists Dr. Ge twice. (That is ironic, since he has told me that he repeatedly sought to have his name removed.) The editorial board is said to include "Peter Gill, Professor of Forensic Genetics, University of Oslo, Norwegian Institute of Public Health, Norway."

The lead article in the most recent issue (11:6, 2020) bears the carefully edited title "A Path of Sympathetic to the Forensic Science from the Sight of Forensic Anthropology." Thankfully, the "in Press" list of articles is blank. \2/ 

NOTES

1. On November 23, 2021, an anonymous comment to this posting observed that "Sheila Willis is a friend and colleague of mine. She has been trying to have her name removed from the journal but has been unsuccessful so far. She is not affiliated with this journal in any way. In addition, the photo and bio provided with Sheila's name are not even hers."
2. In the archives, one can find the (well written) work of researchers and administrators from the U.S. Department of Justice and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Gregory J. Dutton, Gerald M. LaPorte, Iris R. Wagstaff, and H.R. Spivak, Cultivating the Next Generation of Forensic Scientists Through Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), J. Forensic Res. 2017, 8:4.