Talk:Bentham Science Publishers

Corrections needed
I have noticed some inaccurate information on this article, i was unsure about the right procedure to correct it therefore i am pointing these out here. For example, in just the introduction i see the below inaccuracies.

1. Incorrect facts: a. Bentham Science Publishers is based in Sharjah, UAE not Dubai, UAE. Reference: http://www.benthamscience.com/Contact.php

b. Bentham Science is a scientific, technical, and medical (STM) literature publisher and it is refered to as just academic journal publisher. (Reference: http://www.aardvarknet.info/access/number50/monthnews.cfm?monthnews=11)

c. Bentham Science more known as the publisher of subscription based journal rather than open access journals. It is presented otherwise in the article highlighting it as an open access journal publisher which is incorrect. Bentham published its first journal back in 1993 which was a subscription based title and it only started publishing open access journals in 2008. (reference: http://www.aardvarknet.info/access/number50/monthnews.cfm?monthnews=11)

d. Information about Bentham Science is incomplete as it started publishing ebooks in 2010. (reference: http://www.benthamscience.com/ebooks/index.htm )

I want to know similar information about bentham can be updated in the article. If there is a problem in the above mentioned facts that i have expressed i want to know how this can be improved. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Atif9975 (talk • contribs) 07:59, 24 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Hi, I have added this info to the article, but in future, you can do such things yourself, too. --Crusio (talk) 13:34, 26 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Hi, what is the best way to include new information such as below on the publishers page.

Bentham Science has unveiled three subscription journals in print and electronic format; Adolescent Psychiatry, Recent Patents on Regenerative Medicine and Recent Patents on Biomarkers. The publisher says eleven more will follow in 2011.

Adolescent Psychiatry, the official journal for the American Society of Adolescent Psychiatry, is peer-reviewed and offers mental health professionals, who work with adolescents, current information on the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric disorders.

At the same time, Recent Patents on Regenerative Medicine and Recent Patents on Biomarkers are part of the continuing series of ‘Patent Review titles’. The journals publish reviews and research articles on recent patents on these topics and aim to include a list of recently registered patents in each field.

Future publications will cover a range of subjects including nanotechnology, wireless communications, and physical and inorganic chemistry.

Reference: http://www.researchinformation.info/products/product_details.php?product_id=333 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Atif9975 (talk • contribs) 05:55, 8 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Perhaps better wait when they are launched and become notable. Bentham is not one of those companies (like movie or stock exchange giants) where every news affects our lives. Materialscientist (talk) 05:58, 8 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Materialscientist is absolutely right. Many new journals fail Wikipedia's "notability" guidelines (see WP:NJournals and WP:GNG) and articles on them are frequently deleted. If you wait with creating new articles until the journals are included in selective, major databases (not GoogleScholar or DOAJ, for example, which are perhaps major but not selective), then your articles will be much less likely to be challenged and even if this were to happen, such challenges will then be highly unlikely to be successful. --Crusio (talk) 07:37, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

Removed text
I removed the following text:

"Bentham Open journals claim to employ peer review; however, some reports that a fake paper generated with SCIgen had been accepted for publication, have cast doubt on this. Furthermore, the publisher is known for spamming scientists with invitations to become a member of the editorial board of its journals."

This seemed like a smear campaign based on an idea that a peer review cannot be flawed. As evidenced by the added text, the article should reflect that this is a serious publisher, and add any controversy as supplementary information, not as the main point. Narssarssuaq (talk) 15:54, 15 November 2012 (UTC)


 * "Peer review cannot be flawed" give me a break: it was literally a randomly generated nonsense paper. Anyone reading a few sentences would have noted it as such.  Moreover, the paragraph is well-sourced and relevant.  I've reinstated it. --JBL (talk) 16:02, 15 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Not acceptable. This is obviously a serious publisher with journals that have significant impact factors, and the article needs to reflect this fact. The version you reverted back to gives clear undue weight on the controversy, and does not present the activities of Bentham. I therefore revert your contribution. Narssarssuaq (talk) 16:19, 15 November 2012 (UTC)
 * "obviously a serious publisher". That's an assertion, not an argument. The claim to notability is pretty much from the controversy over lack of peer review. IRWolfie- (talk) 23:57, 15 November 2012 (UTC)
 * I will not bother arguing with people who obviously use Wikipedia as a tool for politics. From the impact factor of the journals you removed from the article you can see for yourself that you're battling some mighty forces in your crusade to label Bentham as useless. That's the final word from me on this issue. Narssarssuaq (talk) 00:20, 16 November 2012 (UTC)
 * I can't even begin to figure out what you're on about, but please don't feel obligated to explain yourself. IRWolfie, is there anything from Narssarssuaq's additions worth keeping?  (I didn't look carefully because of the obviously inappropriate deletions.). --JBL (talk) 01:13, 16 November 2012 (UTC)
 * OK, I'll explain. If you perform a Google search, there appears to be an active smear campaign against Bentham from the online scientific skepticism community due to the publication of a controversial article. This may of course be due to some honourable anti-cult end: if this publisher is not trustworthy, the article isn't either. However, as the main field of Wikipedia's interest in Bentham is their journals and their publication, which as I have stated several times are clearly accepted, in fact impact factors are a clearly authorative source of this, the criticism section has to be subservient to the actal, factual information about the publisher. The article for Elsevier can serve as an example for how it might eventually turn out. Narssarssuaq (talk) 01:30, 16 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Due weight is established by what is covered in the secondary sources. In this case that is the criticism. Unsubstantiated allegations of a smear campaign are irrelevant. Bentam Science Publishers aren't like Elsevier, so that's a pretty bad comparison (and even that article has a very large criticism section). IRWolfie- (talk) 10:50, 16 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Elsevier is a pretty good comparison, considering that they are in exactly the same business, doing exactly the same things, and are also surrounded by a certain degree of controversy, which is (over)emphasised in the article about them. As you do not acknowledge this to me pretty obvious fact, assuming good faith, you either base your conclusions on pieces of information that you have not yet provided, you do not understand the concept of impact factor, or you did not read my edits or disagreed only partially with them. Again assuming good faith, this is a Start-class article, and it is not entirely clear how such an article should look. Seeing you're both mathematicians, I might have assumed scientific scepticism faith rather than good faith. In that case, I would have expected you to create an argument through arbitrarily cherrypicking empirically based observations rather than seeking common ground - the very same argumentative methodology which is employed by conspiracy theorists. Narssarssuaq (talk) 11:48, 16 November 2012 (UTC)
 * I was so much happier when you said you were giving your last word. The be-all and end-all here is the issue of reliable sources; OR opinions about impact factor ratings are not, articles in New Scientist are, and there's not really much more that needs to be said about why your edits are problematic.  In addition, you should knock off the projection that's been present in all your comments here (beginning with your edit that removed well-sourced criticism and replaced it with a laudatory paragraph about journals with decidedly middling impact factors) and retread WP:AGF. Edit to add: this actually will be my last word in this discussion, unless someone starts making more bad edits along these lines. -- — Preceding unsigned comment added by Joel B. Lewis (talk • contribs) 14:10, 16 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Fine, let's end this miserable debate which got us absolutely nowhere. Narssarssuaq (talk) 17:03, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Another hoax article accepted
Here is an article talking about a sting where hundreds of open access journals were sent bogus scientific articles. Here is a list of publishers that accepted the papers including Bentham's "The Open Bioactive Compounds Journal".AioftheStorm (talk) 02:36, 6 October 2013 (UTC)

Article Defamatory, Biased and Misleading
As it stands, this article is heavily biased and defamatory to Bentham. It cherry picks a few facts to support a wild generalisation that all Bentham journals fail to adhere to proper standards of peer review. However, if one reads a more balanced article on this subject, such as the New Scientist piece in the references, "CRAP paper accepted by journal - opinion - 11 June 2009", you will find several pieces of very salient information omitted from this Wikipedia entry:

1. Bentham's Open Software Engineering Journal rejected a SCIgen generated paper - presumably after peer review - sent by the same people who successfully fooled the editors of the Open Information Science Journal. This alone is sufficient to prove that at least some Bentham journals do adhere to some standards of quality control and/or peer review. Why does this article not mention this important point? A more balanced conclusion might be that there was a problem with the standards employed by one of Bentham's many journals on one occasion. It seems to me that the article wants to smear all Bentham journals, in particular the Open Chemical Physics Journal, which published the controversial paper analysing dust from the 9/11 attacks. However, there is no evidence at all that this latter journal is not peer reviewed. That is mere insinuation.

2. Most importantly, many other scientific publishers, including very well-known names such as Elsevier, have also been caught accepting nonsense papers generated using SCIgen. For example, this happened in 2007 when Elsevier's journal, Applied Mathematics and Computation accepted such a paper. Numerous other esteemed organisations (such as IEEE) and publishers have also accepted SCIgen nonsense papers, as this list shows. Where are all the Wikipedia articles insinuating that they don't practice peer review? Why is Bentham singled out?

I have published numerous papers and been through the peer review process a number of times. I know from personal experience that the process is often flawed, for reasons too numerous to mention. It is a fact that many poor-quality papers do end up getting published, even in the most prestigious journals. Nearly all of these papers have been through peer review, but that is no guarantee of quality, in my view. In fact, there is no such thing as a guarantee of quality. To judge a scientific paper, you have to read it and then you have to think about it critically, yourself.

Frankly, I recommend this article for deletion, since its sole purpose is to single out one scientific publisher for special criticism, rather than to give unbiased information about Bentham and its numerous peer-reviewed journals.82.43.175.108 (talk) 12:23, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

This article can be considered a political attack. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Texdevelopers (talk • contribs) 16:58, 12 November 2013 (UTC)


 * "Where are all the Wikipedia articles insinuating that they don't practice peer review? Why is Bentham singled out?"
 * The Criticism and controversies section of Elsevier is about 5 times larger than Bentham's entire article. If you want to add more criticism to those articles then please bring it up there. If you want to mention other sources stating positive things about Bentham then go ahead. If you want to remove sourced statements about Bentham then please consider that those are legitimate criticisms and should present in any article attempting to give broad coverage to this publisher.AioftheStorm (talk) 04:06, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Less spammy?
User:Randykitty recently made an edit with edit summary "the subscription-based journals are actually quite decent and don't spam (and my impression is that BOS recently spams less or not at all any more)." Is there any hope of documenting this? It would certainly be nice to be able to say that they've improved former bad behaviors, if true. --JBL (talk) 19:36, 19 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I have no sources for this. Just my personal experience that I have never (as far as I recall) been spammed by their subscription journals and can't remember when last I got spammed by Bentham Open. So I'm afraid that we can't write this in the article, but I would keep this out of the lead for the moment. Also, while Bentham Open is on Beall's list, the subscription journals are not (although that doesn't say much, as a subscription journal cannot be a predatory OA journal by definition). In any case, comparing editorial boards between the OA and subscription-based journals shows many well-known scientists in the latter, but much fewer in the former, so this confirms my impression a bit (but this is OR/SYNTH and we cannot use that in the article either...) --Randykitty (talk) 20:14, 19 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Ok. I am comfortable removing the mention of spam from the lead (it is less-sourced than the dubious peer review anyhow).  I am also happy with the qualification to the OA branch.  --JBL (talk) 20:47, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

Request to add more notable journals in the journals list category page
The current list of journals published by Bentham Science Publishers as mentioned in the list appears to be incomplete. I would like to request the moderators of this page to add the complete list of journals to the category page. This would make the list appear accurate. Some journals are listed here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Farrukh2014 (talk • contribs)
 * You should not manually add journals to the category page, that is not what categories are for. Nor do we have exhaustive lists of journals for almost any publisher. Many of Bentham's journals are (not yet) notable (see WP:GNG and WP:NJournals), so they don't have articles and don't show up in the category. --Randykitty (talk) 15:35, 24 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I have read these guidelines on notablility and i agree with your comments above. However there may be few more jpurnals by this publisher that have either have an impact factor ranking or may be indexed in a notable databse both. While this may not guarantee notability of more publications, I feel that the list can be revised, slightly. (I have also changed the heading of this request to reflect the notability aspect). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Farrukh2014 (talk • contribs)
 * If those journals are notable, there is no problem with creating articles for them (see our journal article writing guide for some helpful tips). They will then automatically be included in this list once the appropriate categories have been added. --Randykitty (talk) 07:16, 25 November 2014 (UTC)

External links modified
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Are they even linked?
Browsing through Bentham Science (http://benthamscience.com) and Bentham Open (https://benthamopen.com) I can find no evidence that they are affiliated companies. They never mention each other, it seems. Maybe there are two companies, one of them with a strategically-chosen name? RlyechDweller (talk) 15:14, 11 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Look under "contacts": they both list the same address and same mailbox in Sharjah. --Randykitty (talk) 15:22, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

Corrections made to the number of Open Access journals by Bentham Open
I have corrected the number of journals published by Bentham Open. They are not more than 100. Source: https://benthamopen.com/browse-by-title/A/1/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by 103.236.135.38 (talk) 07:47, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

External links modified
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Spammers
I receive a lot of SPAM by Bentham. They don't even have the name right... totally unprofessional.

http://www.scientificspam.net/?p=12

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Bentham_Science_Publishers

has plenty of references. Chire (talk) 08:20, 12 October 2017 (UTC)


 * I've received a request to review a specific paper for a Bentham biomedical sciences journal where it's completely clear to anyone looking at my scientific profile that I have absolutely no expertise in the subject. Boud (talk) 13:22, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

"A Journal full of lies and deception"
cc: TrangaBellam (talk) 16:02, 23 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Interesting. Source looks ok although maybe some might say not for BLPs, I don't know. But it's only one source and I think we need to wait. Especially as Jisc just signed a contract with them. If there is a problem, I think it will be reported in multiple sources. Doug Weller  talk 16:17, 23 April 2022 (UTC)
 * I won't be adding anything too critical of Bentham. That being said, these accusations of financial impropriety have been raised earlier; see this column by Pervez Hoodbhoy for one. TrangaBellam (talk) 16:36, 23 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Hello, reverting my edits. Please avoid removing strongly sourced content. I think if there is truth to this source it'll be picked up by a mainstream outlet. We should wait before making sweeping edits, as this is a developing story. 2400:ADC1:19A:AD00:E3:5AEE:D4FB:FCFB (talk) 20:04, 24 April 2022 (UTC)
 * You whitewashed the article and at the same time added blatantly promotional language. That was clearly inappropriate. MrOllie (talk) 20:24, 24 April 2022 (UTC)
 * A profile of Sujag, the publication medium. TrangaBellam (talk) 16:39, 23 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Blatantly obvious whitewashing by IPs aside (which is obviously someone involved with the company or one of its publications), I agree with - this should not be added to the page until corroborated by multiple sources. Sulaj's historical reputation is as activist company and non-profit (defined in the profile posted), which also raises questions of how 'independent' the journalism is. Should be removed until these rumors are supported by other reputable outlets.  Sharptictack (talk) 22:22, 28 April 2022 (UTC)
 * You have about 18 edits in this project, hmm. TrangaBellam (talk) 14:47, 29 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Keen observation! Getting back to the topic of discussion here - the reliability of Sulaj - I would point to a quote from the profile you linked to, where it says "Sulaj's editors proudly say their journalistic ethos prioritizes "siding with the marginalized" over neutrality." This would suggest they should not be used as the singular source for unverified information. Sharptictack (talk) 16:57, 29 April 2022 (UTC)
 * WP:BIASED applies. Thanks, TrangaBellam (talk) 17:09, 29 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Btw, what do you mean by unverified information? You have an obvious COI; please disclose it. TrangaBellam (talk) 17:22, 29 April 2022 (UTC)
 * First, I do not have a COI to declare with Bentham Science - for anyone else reading, I'm explicitly stating that I'm NOT an employee, and have no relationship with them (including the person editing from an IP we've already discussed that's clearly from BSP). Regarding WP:BIASED, again - the fact they explicitly state they were borne from an activist organization, and have no regard for neutrality, suggests they're willing to be biased in their work, doesn't it? (which is why I'd consider it unverified) I would think another source would have to be used for any new information (some of what's in the second half is already discussed on the page), which I've not seen appear yet. I do appreciate that you've reviewed and edited some of the information you included, but I disagree with the assessment of the source's quality and intentions.Sharptictack (talk) 22:55, 30 April 2022 (UTC)
 * The point of WP:BIASED is that sources are not required to be neutral - that a source has a bias in some direction is not disqualifying. MrOllie (talk) 23:52, 30 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank you for taking the time to respond, MrOllie (and TrangaBellam as well, despite the accusations) - I still feel like a publication explicitly noting that they welcome a heavy bias in their reporting, one that would potentially affect the accuracy and neutrality, isn't up to Wikipedia's (admittedly low) standards for a source. But thank you for the explanation of how to interpret WP:BIASED, as I had considered it differently, especially when I was unable to find anything to corroborate the validity of Sulaj's reporting (or any other news outlet covering the story, which still appears to be the case). Sharptictack (talk) 10:04, 6 May 2022 (UTC)