Q: Is this invitation from an overseas journal to be considered as predatory?

Detailed Question -

The other day, I was invited via email by American Journal of Physics and Applications to be a member of an editorial board or a reviewer. I’m not sure if this is a predatory journal, but do you think such a request should be judged as predatory?

1 Answer to this question
Answer:

It’s great that you are being so sharp about these invites – these are typically predatory. While they are more damaging to authors (from a monetary perspective), they can be equally damaging to reviewers (from a credibility perspective).

To answer your question, we had a look at the journal site, and based on our experience and on using our checklist, we do believe it’s a predatory journal or at least a low-quality journal. Some identifiers are logos of affiliate sites with no links, an address in a Global North location that seems questionable, and duplicate mentions of editorial board members (indicating no/low-quality checking). You may check for these aspects yourself using this checklist: 10 Point checklist to identify predatory publishers

Additionally, you may go through this previous query by another user around the publisher of this journal: Is 'Science Publishing Group' indexed in Scopus?

And here’s another related piece on watching out for predatory author services: The scientific predator has evolved - here's how you can fight back

Finally, for quality author services, we trust you would know where to go. :-)

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