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I was reading about this organization that is called SAI (https://thesai.org/) which has a number of journals and conferences indexed in Scopus, but I am a little bit dubious if it should be considered a predatory one or not. I see that this organization appears in the famous or infamous Beall´s list (https://beallslist.net/), so should one avoid to publish its research in the venues organized by this organization? I have seen in Scopus that some of their papers are cited from other conferences hosted by ACM, IEEE or from journals from Springer. Bottomline, does anybody has any experience with his association or with the journals or conferences that they organize?

Thanks

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    Have you ever read any papers published in a SAI journal or conference? Have you ever cited any papers published in a SAI journal or conference?
    – JeffE
    Commented Feb 23, 2020 at 3:36
  • I have read some articles published in the FTC conference organized by SAI and there were just normal articles, about the citing not yet, because I am just starting to know their work.
    – Layla
    Commented Feb 23, 2020 at 3:40

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This is hard to say. I lack any first-hand experiences, so I need to rely on vague cues. There are some good signs for them not being predatory, though, such as the following:

  • Their Twitter account shows that they have a relatively large following with a high degree of community engagement, being tagged by influential researchers and institutions such as the Physics Magazine (of the American Physical Society) etc. This indicates that they are taken seriously within a larger scholarly community. (However, their main account @theSAIorg seems to be inactive.)

  • Most of their editorial board members seem to know how to publish well.

  • They deposit metadata at CrossRef, according to a search for the publisher "Science and Information Organization" in CrossRef's Title List. (But then again, according to the discussion here, there are notorious predatory publishers that do the same.)

  • Their articles seem well-cited. Google Metrics shows a h5-median of 59 for this journal, for example.

  • Researchers affiliated at some reputational institutions publish in their journals. Just look at the left-hand side list titled "Top Institutions" at Microsoft Academic, such as for this journal (IJACSA) (e.g. showing the Max Planck Society) or for this journal (IJARAI) (e.g. showing the MIT).

At the same time, there are some puzzling circumstances, which makes me skeptical of my initial judgement. Such as the following:

  • They are not indexed at the DOAJ, even though their journals are all Open Access.
  • There are "< 10" peer review reports validated by Publons for their main journal, which could mean anything from 1 review to 9. And that is quite a low number for a journal that has published so many articles over multiple years.
  • Likewise, there are no peer review reports documented at SciRev.

Thus, my conclusion is: I am not sure...

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    Good assessment. Two concerns, though: 1. predatory journals sometimes list well-known researchers as editorial board members without having their consent (so one should, at least, also check whether some of the researchers list the membership on their own websites); 2. citation counts can be artificially boosted.
    – lighthouse keeper
    Commented Feb 21, 2021 at 16:00
  • thinkchecksubmit.org
    – Anonymous Physicist
    Commented Feb 22, 2021 at 8:26

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