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Monday, January 25, 2021

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.

11 comments:

  1. I gather that Hilaris began in 2011 as a start-up publisher with one journal (and then another). Then OMICS acquired them, gutted them, and are now using the skin as a mask for their own fraudulent journals.
    https://twitter.com/mattjhodgkinson/status/1288592456209096704

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  2. I just submitted an article to JGLTA and after not receiving the review, nor a decent typeset article, and asked for ~1000 EU decided to withdraw: they asked 300 EU for processing costs! we are amazed of what's going on & sorry for not reading the fine print before submitting ...

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  3. Omics charged me for a submission i asked to withdraw they rapidly 'published' and I've never paid. Suddenly Hilaris is now sending me reminders... Says it all

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    Replies
    1. Same heree.. I asked them to withdraw my article and they reduced the charges. Should we pay or not? They threatened me with legal charges

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    2. me too they are doing the same to me for an article was published without my approval in 2018 , may i know what u did ?

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    3. This is the same as mine. I withdraw my article (from Hilaris) yet they still published it and they asked me to pay at least the processing fee. I also received a threat on legal charges if I won't settle the 919 euros.

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    4. Has anyone paid the fees? I received a threat email as a final caution email. Who can we report this to?

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  4. 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.

    ReplyDelete

  5. I paid the publication fee through online payment and still I am waiting for publication.....
    Reference number: 2165-784X-11-426
    » Journal Name: Civil & Environmental Engineering
    » Article Title: Water Supply Assessment and Sustainability in Afgoi District, Somalia.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Found this: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/20500904. Classical copycats!

    Another hint, that there is something strange about hilaris: In a German medical forum there was a discussion about thyroid gland diagnostics and pitfalls in the interpretation of hormone levels. A participant cited an own paper about the topic, published in the Journal of Biometrics & Biostatistics.

    There are two remarkable findings:
    1. The scientific quality of the paper is extremely low - which is not astonishing because the author is known promoting so called alternative medical products.
    2. Much more astonishing: The participants of the discussion AND EVEN THE AUTHOR HIMSELF (!) were unable to find the paper on the homepage of the journal! At last, the author copied his paper into the forum. Interestingly, there were two different sources of information in the journal:

    Manfred, Doepp. "A New Approach to the In Vitro
    Diagnosis of Thyroid Function: Investigation of the Feedback Mechanism."

    1. source: J Biom Biostat 12 (2021): 6.
    2. source: J Biom Biostat, Volume 12: 11, 2021

    (Funny enough, the author's names were not cited correctly: "Manfred" is the given name, "Doepp" his surname, so it should be "Doepp, Manfred".)

    Another strange point you can find in the copy and paste of the author: "Received: November 24, 2020; Accepted: December 09, 2020; Published: December 16, 2020" - which actually does not fit to a publication in 2021 (with the exception of an online-first publication which is not mentioned).

    A retraction of the paper is not mentioned anywhere by hilaris. So it seems they are paid by the authors for open access and let then vanish the papers - somewhat funny.

    For more background information I am posting one "skeptical" link about Dr Doepp:
    https://www.psiram.com/de/index.php/Manfred_Doepp
    and a link to th discussion mentioned above including Dr Doepp's copied paper:
    https://www.doccheck.com/de/detail/articles/37840-thyroxin-werte-der-schein-truegt#comments.
    Unfortunately, both sites (with the exception of Dr Doepp's paper) are in German.

    I apologize for my bad English.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I completed an article and submitted it to african journal of Management and Business Review, when I realised it was a predatory journal I tried to withdraw. However, they published the paper with someone else's name.

    ReplyDelete