Bentham Science Publishers

BENTHAM SCIENCE EXHIBITS AT LONDON BOOK FAIR 2018! â€

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Bentham Science Publishers is a company that publishes scientific, technical, and medical journals and e-books. It publishes 140 subscription-based academic journals and over 60 open access journals. It was established in the Netherlands and is now based at Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. It has operating units in the United States, Japan, China, India, and the Netherlands, where its main sales office is still located. The company has about 15,000 editorial board members and publishes about 12,000 articles annually.

Bentham Open, its open-access branch, has received some criticism for its questionable peer-review practices, and was listed as a "potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publisher" in Jeffrey Beall's list of Predatory Publishers. This list is now defunct. The non open-access Bentham Science, in contrast, publishes some reputable subscription-based journals such as Current Medicinal Chemistry, Current Alzheimer Research and Current Cancer Drug Targets with two Nobel Laureates as honorary advisors.

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Publishing divisions

Bentham Science has three main operating divisions: subscription-based journals, open access titles, and e-books. They publish research literature in all areas of science, medicine, technology, humanities, and social sciences, which is available in both electronic and print versions.

Bentham Science publishes more than 100 subscription-based journals in the fields of biotechnology, biomedical, pharmaceuticals, technology, engineering, computer and social sciences. These titles are indexed in Scopus, Chemical Abstracts, MEDLINE, EMBASE, PubsHub, etc.

Bentham Open Access publishes more than 60 peer-reviewed, free-to-view online journals under Bentham Open. This imprint was identified as a potential predatory publisher by Jeffrey Beall.

Bentham eBooks publish text books, handbooks, monographs, biographies, autobiographies, conference proceedings and review volumes in the areas of medicine, technology, humanities, natural, and social sciences.

Maps Bentham Science Publishers

Controversies and criticism

Bentham Open journals claim to employ peer review; however, the fact that a fake paper generated with SCIgen was accepted for publication, has cast doubt on this. The Publisher contended and explained that the paper was never published but that the acceptance was an attempt to catch the author who submitted the paper Furthermore, the publisher is known for spamming scientists with invitations to become a member of the editorial boards of its journals. Such unsolicited emails also had prompted the SCIgen paper submission to the journal. The emails sent by Bentham also included invitations to the editorial board of subjects where the recipient had no expertise (and thus should not have been invited by any sound journal). In consequence, some editors quit the collaboration with Bentham.

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", a well known 9/11 conspiracy theory. Following publication, the journal's editor-in-chief Marie-Paule Pileni resigned stating, "They have printed the article without my authorization... I have written to Bentham, that I withdraw myself from all activities with them".

In a review of Bentham Open for The Charleston Advisor, Jeffrey Beall noted that "in many cases, Bentham Open journals publish articles that no legitimate peer-review journal would accept, and unconventional and nonconformist ideas are being presented in some of them as legitimate science." He concluded by stating that "the site has exploited the Open Access model for its own financial motives and flooded scholarly communication with a flurry of low quality and questionable research." Beall has since added Bentham Open to his list of "Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers".

In 2013, The Open Bioactive Compounds Journal was one of the journals that accepted an obviously bogus paper submitted as part of the Who's Afraid of Peer Review? sting. The paper was caught and never published. The journal publication was temporarily discontinued during its reorganisation.

In a 2017 study of invitation spam by predatory publishers, Bentham Open was one of the most frequent invitation spammers.