About Those Manipulative Spam Emails from Internal Medicine Review

Complete rubbish.

You have probably received a clever, personalized, and manipulative spam email from a journal called Internal Medicine Review. The email includes a purported email exchange between two people at the journal, with one asking the other to invite you to submit follow-up article to your earlier article. Here’s the backstory.

Internal Medicine Review is a completely fake medical journal that falsely claims to be based in Washington, D.C. This journal alone accounts for a good percentage of the predatory spam emails sent out in 2016. I personally have been hit by their spam several times.

The spam panders to and attempts to manipulate the recipient by feigning a conversation between two imaginary journal executives, one asking the other to contact the recipient and ask him or her to submit a paper to the journal. Here’s the text of the spam email I received recently:

Dear Dr. Beall,

My last email must have reached you at a bad time so I am following up. If you are not the right person to talk to about this please let me know or feel free to forward this email.

Sincerely,

Lisseth

From: Dr. Lisseth Tovar, M.D. [mailto:lisseth.tovar@internalmedicinereview.org]
Sent: Monday, July 11, 2016 7:33 AM
To: Dr. Beall
Subject: manuscript submission from Dr. Beall

Dear Dr. Beall,

I hope this email finds you well. My colleague Milena asked if I could get in touch with you about a paper you authored titled “Predatory publishers are corrupting open access.” Firstly thank you for taking the time to publish this, it was an interesting read. I am hoping to have the opportunity to discuss having a short followup or perhaps a review article published in one of the next issues of the Internal Medicine Review. I think our readers could be interested in a paper with information from any continued research or new data since this was published. It would not have to be a long article, but if you don’t have time for this perhaps you could also reach out to the co-authors or one of your students to collaborate.

If you have moved on from this line of research I am certainly interested in knowing more about your current projects; perhaps there is the potential for an article that would fit our journal. If you have any questions about whether or not a certain subject fits our scope I can put you in contact with Dr. Chadwick Prodromos from our editorial board.

Could you please let me know your thoughts on this?

Sincerely,

Dr. Lisseth Tovar, M. D.
Senior Editor
Internal Medicine Review
http://www.internalmedicinereview.org

From: Mihaleva, Milena [mailto:milena.mihaleva@internalmedicinereview.org]
Sent: Saturday, July 9, 2016 6:54 PM
To: Dr. Lisseth Tovar
Subject: manuscript submission from Dr. Beall

Lisseth,

Would you contact the authors of “Predatory publishers are corrupting open access” about possibly preparing something for the next issue? Or possibly September? Let me know if you can’t find the article and I will send it.

Thank you,

Milena

Tens of thousands of researchers have received similar, personalized spam emails. They are sent wantonly to people in all fields of study, not just internal medicine.

The journal is not open-access; when you navigate to open an article, a link appears that says “Subscribers only.” Following the link brings the user to an empty page.

In fact, there are no subscribers — the entire operation is a scam. I think Internal Medicine Review is connected to the predatory publisher called KEI Journals. KEI claims it’s based in California, but they use a mail forwarding service there.

More complete rubbish.

My understanding is that both Internal Medicine Review and KEI journals are the efforts of Dylan Fazel, of Anoka, Minnesota. He’s been a scholarly publisher since he was in high school, and he’s made a lot of money. His telephone number is (612) 524-5566. When you call it, a recording plays, then the call is transferred to an overseas number.

Pay a princely sum to hide your research.

By the way, if you publish in Internal Medicine Review — a closed-access, subscription journal with no subscribers — you must pay $1250-3000.

Appendix: List of KEI Journals’ titles as of 2016-07-28:

1. Biomedical Engineering Review
2. International Biology Review
3. International Chemistry Review
4. Journal of Economics and Banking
5. Medical Research Archives
6. Quarterly Physics Review