Questionable Spam Email from a Springer Nature Journal

Crossed signals.

I was recently forwarded a very suspicious spam email from Nature’s Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy, a journal co-published by the West China Hospital, Sichuan University. Here’s the highly questionable spam email:

From: Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy <yqwei@scu.edu.cn>
Date: December 6, 2016 at 9:29:34 PM EST
To: [Redacted]
Subject: Invited by STTT published by Nature Publishing Group

Dear Prof. [Redacted],

Hope you are doing well.

Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy (STTT) is published by Nature Publishing Group, http://www.nature.com/sigtrans/about. Its editorial team is led by Professor Carlo M. Croce, a former Editor-in-Chief of Cancer Research, Institute of Genetics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA.

We would like to invite you to contribute original research articles or review articles for upcoming issues. You can submit your submission to manuscript-tracking-system of Nature Publishing Group at http://mts-sigtrans.nature.com/cgi-bin/main.plex.. We can waive your publication fee, since we invite you to submit an article. Also, we can provide a fast-track paper publication avenue for author(s) who is/are interested to have the research work quickly published. Thus, we can finish the review process within one or two weeks. In addition, we can receive the initial-submission manuscript that was prepared without following our journal style guide for authors, since you still have chance to revise your manuscript according to our journal style guide for authors before the publication.

Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal that weekly publishes original research articles and review articles related to all aspects of signal transduction in physiological and pathological processes, as well as signal transduction-targeted therapeutics in the form of biological agents and small molecular drugs used to treat cancer and other diseases. This journal focuses on cutting-edge advances experimentally or clinically. For more details: http://www.nature.com/sigtrans/about.

Looking forward to hearing from you soon.

Best regards，
Co-Editors-in-Chief

Prof. Carlo M. Croce,
Institute of Genetics,
The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA

Prof.Kang Zhang,
Institute for Genomic Medicine,
University of California San Diego, USA

Prof. Yu-quan Wei,
State Key Laboratory of Biotherapy,
West China Hospital, Sichuan University, China

Analysis

Several worrisome things stand out in this email that make it read like an email solicitation from a predatory journal:

1. The email promises a very quick (fast track) peer review process “within one or two weeks.”
2. The email contains grammatical errors and is written using conventions now associated with spam from predatory publishers (“Hope you are doing well”).
3. The email tacitly invites papers rejected from other journals: “… we can receive the initial-submission manuscript that was prepared without following our journal style guide for authors …”
4. The normal author fee for this open-access journal is $3,700. Why is the journal so desperate to publish articles — spamming, waiving the author fee, and promising fast track publishing?
5. The spam doesn’t come from Nature itself, but from the work email address of one of the co-editors.

Conclusion

The profusion of scholarly journals has made the competition for article submission among journals increasingly intense. Journals — even those from respected publishers — are lowering their standards to accommodate authors wanting to publish quickly and easily. Scholarly publishing is increasingly less selective, yet most universities still use publication in “prestigious” journals as a measure of academic success.