Bentham Science Publishers is a company that publishes scientific, technical, and

medical journals Medical literature is the scientific literature of medicine: articles in journals and texts in books devoted to the field of medicine. Many references to the medical literature include the health care literature generally, including that of denti ...

and

e-book An ebook (short for electronic book), also spelled as e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in electronic form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. Al ...

s. It publishes over 120 subscription-based

academic journal An academic journal (or scholarly journal or scientific journal) is a periodical publication in which Scholarly method, scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. They serve as permanent and transparent forums for the ...

s and around 40

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...

journals. As of 2023, 66 Bentham Science journals have received JCR impact factors, and they are a member of the

Committee on Publication Ethics The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) is a nonprofit organization whose stated mission is to define best practice in the ethics of scholarly publishing and to assist editors and publishers to achieve this. Mission COPE educates and sup ...

. ''Bentham Open'', its open access division, has received criticism for questionable peer-review practices as well as invitation spam; it was listed as a "potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open access publisher" in

Jeffrey Beall Jeffrey Beall is an American librarian and library scientist who drew attention to "predatory open access publishing", a term he coined, and created Beall's list, a list of potentially predatory open-access publishers. He is a critic of the o ...

's list of predatory publishers, before the list went defunct.

History

Bentham was incorporated in 1994 by

Atta-ur-Rahman Ata-ur-Rahman () is a masculine Islamic given name. It is built from the Arabic words '' Ata'', ''al-'' and '' Rahman''. The name means "gift of the most merciful", ''ar-Rahman'' being one of the names of God in the Qur'an, which give rise to the ...

and his friend Matthew Honan as a private business entity at the Sharjah Airport International Free Trade Zone in the

United Arab Emirates The United Arab Emirates (UAE), or simply the Emirates, is a country in West Asia, in the Middle East, at the eastern end of the Arabian Peninsula. It is a Federal monarchy, federal elective monarchy made up of Emirates of the United Arab E ...

. An investigative profile from ''Sujag'' notes the publisher to have operated out of Pakistan — for the first six years, from the premises of International Center for Chemical and Biological Sciences and then, from private residential blocks at

Karachi Karachi is the capital city of the Administrative units of Pakistan, province of Sindh, Pakistan. It is the List of cities in Pakistan by population, largest city in Pakistan and 12th List of largest cities, largest in the world, with a popul ...

— in reality, under the banner of a tax-exempt proxy firm, owned by Rahman's sons. As of 2022, the publisher publishes more than 120 subscription-based journals, indexed in Scopus, Chemical Abstracts, MEDLINE, EMBASE, etc. Bentham Open Access published more than 150 peer-reviewed, free-to-view online journals under Bentham Open.

Criticism of Bentham Open

Bentham Open journals claim to employ

peer review Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work (:wiktionary:peer#Etymology 2, peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the ...

; however, a fake paper that was generated using

SCIgen SCIgen is a paper generator that uses context-free grammar to randomly generate nonsense in the form of computer science research papers. Its original data source was a collection of computer science papers downloaded from CiteSeer. All elemen ...

in 2009 was accepted for publication, though it was never officially published and the publisher has since contended that the acceptance was a play-along to catch the author. The author, a graduate student at Cornell University, was motivated into the submission after being bombarded with unsolicited invitations to publish in Bentham's journals and offers to serve in their editorial boards for topics beyond his expertise. In consequence, some editors quit the collaboration with Bentham. In 2013, the now-discontinued ''The Open Bioactive Compounds Journal'' again accepted a blatantly bogus paper submitted as part of the ''

Who's Afraid of Peer Review? "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?" is an article written by ''Science'' correspondent John Bohannon that describes his investigation of peer review among fee-charging open-access journals. Between January and August 2013, Bohannon submitted fake s ...

'' sting. Bentham Open has been accused of

spamming Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, non-commercial proselytizing, or any prohibited purpose (especially phishing), or si ...

scientists to become members of the

editorial board The editorial board is a group of editors, writers, and other people who are charged with implementing a publication's approach to editorials and other opinion pieces. The editorials published normally represent the views or goals of the publicat ...

s of its journals since 2008. In a 2017 study of invitation spam by publishers, Bentham Open was noted to be a habitual offender. 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 Nano-thermite or super-thermite is a metastable intermolecular composite (MIC) characterized by a particle size of its main constituents, a metal fuel and oxidizer, under 100 nanometers. This allows for high and customizable reaction rates. Nano-th ...

", a well known 9/11 conspiracy theory. The journal's

editor-in-chief An editor-in-chief (EIC), also known as lead editor or chief editor, is a publication's editorial leader who has final responsibility for its operations and policies. The editor-in-chief heads all departments of the organization and is held accoun ...

Marie-Paule Pileni Marie-Paule Pileni is a French physical chemist who was born in Tananarive, Madagascar. She is an Emeritus Professor at Sorbonne University and a Senior Member, since 1999, and administrator (2004–2011) of the Institut Universitaire de France. ...

claimed the article was published without her authorization, and resigned. In a July 2009 review of Bentham Open for ''

The Charleston Advisor ''The Charleston Advisor'' (July 1999 – July 2024) was a peer-reviewed publication that reviewed proprietary and free Internet resources that libraries license and make available to their patrons. The journal's tag line was "Critical reviews of ...

'',

accused Bentham Open of exploiting the Open Access model to make quick money, and rejected that they employed any meaningful peer-review. Beall had since added Bentham Open to his list of "Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers".

Notes

References

External links

*
Bentham Open Archives website
{{Authority control Book publishing companies of the United Arab Emirates Academic publishing companies Publishing companies established in 1994 Mass media in Sharjah (city) Companies based in the Emirate of Sharjah Open access publishers * Emirati companies established in 1994 Bentham Open academic journals