[GOAL] Re: Your thoughts about Hindawi Journals

[Heather Morrison]

Dear M. Barbaros Akkurt,

Re: publishing with Hindawi

Hindawi has a solid reputation as a quality scholarly publisher and has been at the forefront of working for best practices for open access journals, for example actively working in this area with the Open Access Scholarly Publishers' Association. I would recommend any of the Hindawi journals with no reservations.

Beall's list is the best one that I know of for journals / publishers to avoid or use caution before considering submitting papers. Some of the publishers on Beall's list are just new and have characteristics that raise concern (possible or potential predatory publishers). 

It is a very good thing for scholars to be giving careful consideration to where they publish. In addition to avoiding new scam publishers, I always encourage scholars to think carefully about the implications of publishing with certain well-established, high-profit publishers. I am beginning to work on explaining why this is important in my blogpost, "Scholars, let's keep our jobs and ditch the commercial scholarly publishers high profit margins":
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2013/10/scholars-lets-keep-our-jobs-and-ditch.html

Another way to look at this is that while Elsevier and Hindawi may be comparable in terms of quality of scholarship (i.e. coordinating peer review), Hindawi articles are approximately an order of magnitude less expensive than Elsevier. For this reason, scholars are better off publishing their work with a publisher such as Hindawi. If all scholars take such simple measures, more revenue can remain in the universities to fund things I suspect most scholars would agree are priorities, such as salaries for academics.

best,

-- 
Dr. Heather Morrison
Assistant Professor
École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
University of Ottawa

http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca