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Below are some journals (just one publisher so far) that (very) frequently solicit my expert opinions, (some) without really checking whether I have the expertise or not, and without any impact factor.

Resources I use to check the credibility of unknown journals:

"Proper" invitations

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 31May 2012, ISI Impact (2011) 1.143, ISSN: 1076-9757. Editor: Alice Lopez

Hindawi Publishing Corporation

Founded in 1997 in Cairo
. currently employs more than 300 employees
. Publishes 200+ open access, peer-reviewed journals.
. Open-access is financed by author fees i.e. non-subscription based.. The author fee currently "tops out at $1,500"
. recently partnered with Sage, a well-established e-journal publisher

22 of the 300 journals have an impact factor higher than 0 for the printed (not online) versions, but below

  • 4.774 according to the Hindawai home page and Thomson ISI (2011, from 2012)
    • based on the years that the printed ISSN 1741-427X was run by BMC
    • the online version ISSN 1741-4288 is not registered!
  • 2.964 according to Research Gate and the University Putra Malaysia

Some other researchers impressions: http://list.uvm.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=MEDLIB-L;wGArog;20110726180255-0700d

I have been solicited to write an expert article for the following journals the past year. Even though I feel flattered, I would not think too much of researchers that publish in these journals with zero impact factor (and not just because they are too new to calculate the factors!)

  • Advances in Bioinformatics (Impact factor: 0, Registered in PubMed Central)
    • Soha Labib is soliciting a large number of potential authors: July, May, March 2012
    • Nada Qassem is soliciting MANY authors: January 2012
    • Four good colleagues of mine, Jörg Hakenberg, Goran Nenadic, Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann, and Jin-Dong Kim edited a Special Issue in May 2011
    • Lina Afify was soliciting my participation in a special issue that I know little about in August 2011, and it is still not registered even on Google Scholar!
  • Advances in Artificial Intelligence (No impact factor, Only registered in INSPEC)
    • Soha Labib is soliciting MANY authors: February 2012
    • Rana Ashour was soliciting MANY authors for an NLP issue: March-June 2011
  • Artificial Evolution and Applications (ISSN: 1687-6229, completely removed from the Hindawi home page list of journals! Why?)
    • Launched in 2007, soliciting entire conferences and mailing lists in January 2010, completely GONE in 2012!
  • Electrical and Computer Engineering (JECE, not bothering to check the impact of this one, probably spam)
    • Rana Ashour is soliciting broadly again: July 2012
  • ISRN Bioinformatics (no impact)
    • Marwa Elmasri was soliciting entire mailing lists in July 2011
  • Molecular Biology International (no impact)
    • Engy Edward was soliciting MANY authors until December 2009. Still NO IMPACT FACTOR!
  • Sequencing (No impact factor, Only indexed by Chemical Abstracts
    • Reem Ali is soliciting MANY authors (I haven't published ANYTHING on Sequencing!): 2012
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