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Does anybody know if conpher is a trustworthy organization?

I have recently received a couple of emails from jm@conpher.com. The email body says:

Congratulations on your new article! We are a group of researchers gathering feedback on your journal publishing experience in order to share with colleagues around the world. I know you are really busy, but it takes less than 90 seconds to share your advice and it could help save a colleague months of stress with future submissions.

followed by a URL to their website with the DOI and my email as arguments. I am very suspicious since I do not see any relationship between conpher and PLOS where the specific article they linked is coming from. In fact, I believe their business model is similar to yelp, except for shopping for journals & publishers.

From their privacy policy, stated in https://conpher.com/privacy-policy/, they seem to want me to evaluate journals and articles.

When you make a review of a journal, we collect the information you state in the review, including which journal you review, which article(s) the review concerns, and how you evaluate the journal.

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    I'm not familiar with the site, but at a first glance it seems to have goals similar to SciRev. If so, I don't think the lack of an apparent association with the journal you submitted to is a red flag in itself. On the contrary, if it is a legit review site independence is likely a positive.
    – Anyon
    Jun 22, 2020 at 16:11

1 Answer 1

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I work for Conpher.

Conpher was started by 35 postdoc researchers who want to share journal article publication experiences in order to share advice on where best to publish your research. Conpher is a is free platform available for all to search.

We are independent of all journals and publishers.

We launched in June 2020. Colleagues in over 30 countries have already shared their experiences. Sharing one's experience should take less than 90 seconds.

We display publication times, acceptance times, quality of peer review, quality and timelines of editorial/publisher communications and recommendations from past authors.

All reviews are validated in order to provide you with genuine advice which can help you determine the best journal for you to publish your research in.

We also add journal data such as CiteScore, Acceptance Rates, OA Licences and recent samples of articles published.

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    Conflicts of interest should be explicitly stated. Aug 8, 2020 at 3:12
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    Welcome to Academia.SE. I edited your post a bit to make it more specifically address the question, and to read less like an advertisement. Feel free to make further edits if needed, but note that "spam" is subject to deletion.
    – cag51
    Aug 8, 2020 at 4:34
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    All reviews are validated how? Aug 8, 2020 at 17:31
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    @John Marshall Did you or your company also post the second, very badly styled and heavily promotional answer that has been deleted?
    – henning
    Aug 9, 2020 at 7:50
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    @henning--reinstateMonica You mean, this one? No, Satyajay Mandal has been at this for a while. Aug 9, 2020 at 17:10

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