Official website benthamscience.com | Founded 1994 | |
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Headquarters location Emirate of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates | ||
Bentham science publishers a graphical overview
Bentham Science Publishers is a company that publishes scientific, technical, and medical journals and e-books. It publishes more than 100 subscription-based academic journals and over 150 open access journals. It is based at Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, and has operating units in the United States, Japan, China, India, and the Netherlands. More than 90 percent of the workforce is outsourced to Pakistan. Other outsource operations are in China, UK, USA, India and other countries. Its open access branch, Bentham Open Science, has received severe criticism for its questionable peer-review practices, and was listed as a "Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publisher" in Jeffrey Beall's list of Predatory Publishers.
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Publishing divisions
Bentham Science has three main operating divisions: subscription-based journals, open access titles, and e-books. They publish research literature in all areas of science, medicine, technology, humanities, and social sciences, which is available in both electronic and print versions.
Bentham Science publishes more than 100 subscription-based journals in the fields of biotechnology, biomedical, pharmaceuticals, technology, engineering, computer and social sciences. These titles are indexed in Scopus, Chemical Abstracts, MEDLINE, EMBASE, PubsHub, etc.
Bentham Open Access publishes more than 100 peer-reviewed, free-to-view online journals under Bentham Open. This imprint has been identified as a predatory publisher by Jeffrey Beall.
Bentham eBooks publish text books, handbooks, monographs, biographies, autobiographies, conference proceedings and review volumes in the areas of medicine, technology, humanities, natural, and social sciences.
Controversies and criticism
Bentham Open journals claim to employ peer review; however, the fact that a fake paper generated with SCIgen had been accepted for publication, has cast doubt on this. Furthermore, the publisher is known for spamming scientists with invitations to become a member of the editorial boards of its journals.
In 2009, the Bentham Open Science journal The Open Chemical Physics Journal published a study contending dust from the World Trade Center attacks contained "active nanothermite". Following publication, the journal's editor-in-chief Marie-Paule Pileni resigned stating, "They have printed the article without my authorization… I have written to Bentham, that I withdraw myself from all activities with them".
In a review of Bentham Open for The Charleston Advisor, Jeffrey Beall noted that "in many cases, Bentham Open journals publish articles that no legitimate peer-review journal would accept, and unconventional and nonconformist ideas are being presented in some of them as legitimate science." He concluded by stating that "the site has exploited the Open Access model for its own financial motives and flooded scholarly communication with a flurry of low quality and questionable research." Beall has since added Bentham Open to his list of "Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers".
In 2013, The Open Bioactive Compounds Journal was one of the journals that accepted an obviously bogus paper submitted as part of the Who's Afraid of Peer Review? sting. It has since been discontinued.