'History Research' journal scam - postscript

From: Leo Enticknap <[email protected]>

Dear All,

Sarah S. Dellman writes:

"...when you receive strange
invitations to publish articles in Open Access journals..."

That's the
weird thing - the David Publishing racket is NOT open access: they
charge subscriptions of around $300 for their titles. Given that open
access publishing is about to become a requirement for all
taxpayer-funded humanities research grants in Britain, you'd have
thought that these crooks would be on to that one and make their pitch
accordingly.

Many thanks for everyone's responses and links. I guess
that until yesterday, I was a publishing scam virgin, so to speak. The
original approach from them was asking for the paper I gave at the 2011
IAMHIST conference, and so I'm guessing that they looked at the online
programme and went after some of the people who were on it.
Interestingly they didn't target everyone, though, because two of my
colleagues here at Leeds also presented at that conference, and neither
received an email from David (I asked them both today).
One postscript.
Suspicious of the broken English in their emails to me, and noting one
of the comments on a web page link cited in response to my posting on
another list (from someone who lived in El Monte, CA, who had been to
the address of David's purported office and found nothing but a vacant
lot), I looked at the email header on their last email, and checked the
originating IP on whois.net. The IP address from which that message
originated is registered to an ISP in Fujian Province, China. That would
also square with the fact that their messages always arrive between
0700-0900 hours my time: during the working day in Fujian, but the
middle of the night in El Monte.

This is very useful to know about,
especially so that I can warn my PhD supervisees to be wary of
unsolicited approaches by publishers, especially in the weeks following
a conference presentation. Thanks again.

Leo