About two weeks ago I received an invitation to submit an article to the online Journal of Languages and Culture. That’s odd, I thought. Had it been the Journal of Slightly Amusing TEFL-related Humour or the Journal of Yet Another Language Learning Game with a Sticky Ball, I probably would have invited me too. If it really is a serious Journal of Languages and Culture, though, they’ve got the wrong guy.

Then this morning I received another email from them. This time they want me to submit a paper to the Journal of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Research. While that is no sillier than me being able to submit a proper paper on linguistics, I think I can now safely say that they are spammers and scammers. And lo and behold, they charge authors for being published, their Editorial Board pages are missing, there is no mention of peer review, and the last two editions of the Languages one only had two pieces each. So, a ripoff pure and simple, and to be avoided at all cost (which unfortunately those four people who did submit to the last two editions obviously didn’t spot). This forum thread came to same conclusion.