I received an email from the Editorial Assistant of a journal called 'Journal of Clinical Case Report.' It read as follows.
I wonder if you could write a case report or a short commentary of about 500 words (or any type of article) for the Journal of Clinical Case Report.It would be great if you could submit by February 26th, 2014 so that I could process for the upcoming issue. If it is not feasible for you in February, then please let me know your feasible time to contribute. Please provide me your acceptance for the same! I will be waiting for your positive mail.
I had a feeling about this email invitation. So I visited the journal's home page and found out the following information from a link on questions.
The publication charges for OMICS Group journals range from $900-1800 for low income countries, $1300-2600 for middle income countries and $1800-3600 in USD for high income countries. The publication charges are classified based on the World Bank Economies of countries.
I wrote to the sender of the email as follows.
Thank you for the invitation. I can always write for a journal. Since you have invited me to write, I trust there will be no charges for the same. In fact, I wonder if you will pay me a fee for writing.
By the way, I am editor-in-chief for Journal of Postgraduate Gynecology & Obstetrics, which is an open access, free, online journal. We do not charge any fee in any form for publication of articles. Perhaps you would like to recommend this journal to your authors/contributors?I have not received any answer t that email. Now I know how they make money. This is not the first journal to write to me like this. It is beyond me how journal editors believe they can invite people to write for them and then ask them to pay money for that. Some people must be falling for that trick.
