An invitation from a not-so-famous journal called "world biomedical frontiers" to feature my paper on their website

Question

I received an email from world biomedical frontiers journal:

Your recent paper “XXXXXX” (published in “YYYYYY”) has been selected to be featured in our next issue of World Biomedical Frontiers, because of its innovation and potential for significant impact. Research results with significant potential to improve health – or to treat or prevent disease – often deserve an immediate leap onto the “front page”. However, scientific breakthroughs don't always make the front page – and some don't make any page! We are the platform for you to stand out from among ~100,000 papers published each month, in order to attract more attention from the public and potential investors. World Biomedical Frontiers [ISSN: 2328-0166] focuses on cutting-edge biomedical research from around the globe. Our website receives more than 8,000 visits per month from an international audience of academic and industrial researchers and developers, providing greater opportunity for your results to be recognized and appreciated. If you accept our invitation to feature your paper on our website, a $38 processing fee will be charged. We will then post the abstract/summary of your paper in the latest section of Stem cells , with additional information from you highly recommended to further explain your novel findings and concepts in plain language; photos and/or figures are welcomed. Here are two examples (1 and 2 ). In order to report breaking publications in a timely fashion, please contact us within two weeks if you wish your paper to be featured in our next issue. Sincerely,

Editor

World Biomedical Frontiers,

New York, USA

Phone: 1-(917) 426-1571

E-mails: [email protected]

Website: http://biomedfrontiers.org/

Should I trust them?

I read this question and also this one, but I wanted to know about this specific case and what to do about it.

Answer 1

No; this isn't how reputable venues approach authors. This will have at best zero value (possibly negative value if someone notices, which is unlikely given how little visibility they apparently have), and will cost you $38.

(Its funny that they advertise that they get 8000 website hits per month. This strikes me as an exceedingly low count, given that they probably get a hit from many people they send this spam email to)

Answer 2

I suggest that you do not trust them.

Reasons not to trust them:

• Their home page has a bare url lying around which accounts for lack of expertise.
• Their FAQ page has some serious grammatical errors (capitalization) which again point to the same direction.
• Their Alexa Rank has fallen and the stats provided by them do not look reliable according to the Alexa page.
• Who provides site hits in an invitation? Thats like Google interviewer telling you Google's gross profit of the quarter to you before your interview.

Answer 3

This is a pretty clear scam. These things are unfortunately common as of late in academia. There are scam journals that try to make money off of things like "processing fees," scam conferences with scam talk invitations, and so on. Unfortunately, they'll just keep on contacting you, and you'll get more of them in the future.

In this case: if a legitimate group wanted to feature your work in this way, they'd just do it on their own. It's very possible they wouldn't even contact you, or wouldn't be contacting you with the choice of whether to have it in their publication or not. And as has been noted in some comments here, 8,000 hits per month is nothing; it's surprising that they don't lie and give a reasonable number.

In general, you shouldn't need to pay for things you are invited to; this is often a good way to discern scams from legitimate invitations. Additionally, you can often tell by the lack of effort (eg, form letters), and lack of knowledge about what you actually do (just copying your paper title).