Academic Integrity

SCIRP generated controversy in 2010 when it was found that its journals duplicated papers which had already been published elsewhere, without notification of or permission from the original author and of the copyright holder.^[12] Several of these publications have subsequently been retracted.^[5] Some of the journals had listed academics on their editorial boards without their permission or even knowledge, sometimes in fields very different from their own.^[13] In 2012, one of its journals, Advances in Pure Mathematics, accepted a paper written by a parody generator; the paper was not published, but only due to its author's unwillingness to pay the publication fee.^[14] The company has also been noted for the many unsolicited bulk emails it sends to academics about its journals.^[8][13]

In 2013, the Open Journal of Pediatrics, a SCIRP journal, published a study which concluded that the number of babies born with thyroid problems in the western United States increased by 16 percent in 2011 compared to 2010, after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. The study has been criticized for not taking into account the fact that 2010 was a year with an unusually low number of births with thyroid problems. SCIRP refused to print a letter criticizing the study, but offered to publish it as an article for a charge.^[6]

The company has been included in a list of questionable open access publishers,^[15][16] according to Jeffrey Beall's criteria.^[17] Beall states that "This publisher exists for two reasons. First, it exists to exploit the author-pays Open Access model to generate revenue, and second, it serves as an easy place for foreign (chiefly Chinese) authors to publish overseas and increase their academic status." He acknowledges that its fees are relatively low, describing this as "a strategy that increases article submissions," and that "it has attracted some quality article submissions. Nevertheless, it is really a vanity press."^[8]

Further controversy was generated by a mass resignation of the editorial board of one of the company's journals, Advances in Anthropology, in 2014. According to the former editor-in-chief, Fatimah Jackson, it was motivated by failures to include the editorial board in the journal's review process, and by "consistent and flagrant unethical breaches by the editorial staff in China", for whom publishing the journal "was only about making money." According to Beall, this was the first mass resignation from an open-access journal.^[4]

In 2021 Cabells' Predatory Reports described SCIRP as a "well-known predatory publisher".^[2] In the Norwegian Scientific Index the publisher and all of its journals have a rating of 0 (non-academic).^[18] An academic study published in 2022 stated that SCIRP was "widely known to host 'fake journals'".^[3]