Saturday, March 2, 2019

Phronesis is "for an author who resembles in the scientific community"

Phronesis LLC lists 24 journals on its website, www.phronesisonline.com. According to Zoominfo, Phronesis LLC is a Delaware company that has $6.2 million of revenue and 31 employees. The company "aspire[s] to expand the knowledge in science and its discoveries that leads its way to new inventions which structures brilliant benefits and for betterment in human lives." An answer to a frequently asked question on the Phronesis website is that "[a]ll articles published by Phronesis journals are peer-reviewed and as this is start up journal we are not yet indexed anywhere." Compared to journals that make misleading claims about indexing, this answer is refreshing.

The first journal on the list is Current Research in Applied Physics. It has no named editor-in-chief, no past articles, no articles in press, and nothing under review. But it plans to have an "inaugural issue" at the end of April 2019. Toward this end, it has "Publication Ethics" that "is a very important tool for an author who resembles in the scientific community." And, it has an editorial board consisting of
⊖ Yongli Gao, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester, USA
⊖ Ephraim Suhir, Physical Sciences and Engineering Research Division, Portland State University, USA
⊖ Thomas F. George, University of Missouri-St. Louis, USA
⊖ Ramesh Agarwal, Department of Aerospace Engineering, Wichita State University, USA
⊖ Luigi Maxmilian Caligiuri, Foundation of Physics Research Center, University and Scientific Research (MIUR), Italy
⊖ Victor V. Apollonov, A.M. Prokhorov General Physics Institute of RAS, Russia
⊖ Vladimir V. Rumyantsev, A.A. Galkin Donetsk Institute for Physics and Engineering, Ukraine
⊖ Maros Halama, Institute of Materials, Technical University of Kosice, Slovakia
⊖ Mohsen Challan, Department of Physics, University of Majmaah, Al-Zulfi, Saudi Arabia
The second journal, the Phronesis Journal of Nanotechnology and Nanomedicine, has no editorial board and no editor-in-chief, but it announces that "Editor-in-Chief‘s shapes the research that is being done and being on the cutting edge of the latest advancements of your field that are the true rewards." I stopped perusing the website at this point.

The company's domain, phronesisonline.com, is registered to DomainsByProxy.com. The address it uses is provided, for a monthly fee, by Davinci Virtual Office Solutions. This firm advertises that
At our virtual office locations in Malvern Business Center, 5 Great Valley Parkway, Malvern, PA 19355 we have everything to meet your virtual business needs. Continue your telecommuting or home working and impress your clients with a virtual address at Malvern Business Center, 5 Great Valley Parkway, Malvern, PA 19355.
The spam I received from "Nithya Toxicology-2019 Conference" had a link that McAfee marked as leading to a malicious website. It is posted on the Flaky Academic Conferences blog.

UPDATE
3/4/19: In a comment to this posting, an Internet sleuth "Smut Clyde" reports a connection between phronesis sites and Subbarao D of Hyderabad.

1 comment:

  1. Another copy of the website resides at 'https://phronesisopenaccess.us/'. That domain, along with several close variants, are all housed on a single IP address:
    "Website using this ip : 132.148.156.95
    phronesisonline.com
    phronesispublishers.com
    phronesispublishers.info
    phronesispublishers.org
    phronesispublishers.net
    phronesisopenaccess.us"

    The .us version is not so anonymised, and a Whois query is more productive:

    "Registrant Name: Subbarao D
    Registrant Organization: phronesis
    Registrant Street: Hyderabad"

    https://domainbigdata.com/phronesisopenaccess.us

    ReplyDelete