[4][5][6][7][8][excessive citations] The U.S. National Institutes of Health sent a cease-and-desist letter to OMICS in 2013, demanding it to discontinue with false claims of affiliation with U.S. government entities or employees.
[1] OMICS operates on a gold open access model, wherein the author pays for publication and the publisher makes the articles available for free.
[3][4][5][6][7][8] It has been subject to widespread criticism, notably by Jeffrey Beall, who included OMICS in his list of "potential, possible, or probable predatory" publishers.
[4][19] Other criticisms of OMICS include the publication of pseudoscientific articles,[4] deceptive marketing practices,[18][7] targeting of young investigators or those in lower-income regions,[7][8] and holding papers hostage by disallowing their withdrawal (preventing them from being published by other journals).
[28][29] It has also been suggested that OMICS provides fake lists of scientists as journal editors to create an impression of scientific legitimacy, even though they are not involved in any review or editing process.
[10] The company has also been slow to remove the names of editorial board members who requested to terminate their relationship with OMICS activities, in some cases taking almost two years.
[33] A Bloomberg News investigation in 2017 noted a tendency of pharmaceutical companies to publish in these journals, which might have stemmed from a self-interest in skipping rigorous review procedures.
[34] An example of such a meeting is the 2016 International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics, organised by ConferenceSeries, and to which Christoph Bartneck, an associate professor in Information Technology at New Zealand's University of Canterbury, was invited.
With little knowledge of nuclear physics, Bartneck used iOS's autocomplete function to write the paper, choosing randomly from its suggestions after starting each sentence,[36] and submitted it under the name Iris Pear (a reference to Siri and Apple).
[1] In another example, Tom Spears of the Ottawa Citizen repeatedly submitted to OMICS conferences several sting abstracts that included "Evolution of flight characteristics in avian-porcine physiology" and "Strategies for remediation of benthic and pelagic species dependent on coral reefs: Cases of T. migratorius and G. californianus" which respectively claimed to explain how pigs fly and claimed roadrunner birds lived underwater.
[7] In August 2016, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a suit against OMICS, two of its affiliated companies and Gedela, charging them with deceptive publishing practices[28] and seeking an unspecified monetary reimbursement for academics duped by them.
[1] The FTC also noted a failure to disclose publishing fees prior to accepting pieces, citing of dubious impact factors and false assertions about their journals being indexed in PubMed, when they are not.
86) on 29 March 2019, with the court finding that OMICS made false claims about manuscripts being peer-reviewed, used the name of prominent researchers as editors of journals without their consent or knowledge, used misleading impact factors for journals which had not been calculated by Clarivate Analytics, made false claims about being indexed by PubMed, was not transparent about the publication fees charged per manuscript until after it had accepted an article for publication, and often did not allow researchers to withdraw their articles after submission.
[47] In 2013, OMICS Publishing Group sent a letter to then University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall stating that they intended to sue him and were seeking $1 billion in damages.
[18] An editorial in the New Delhi-based India Today cited the incident as evidence that Section 66A should be discarded to eliminate its use in "stifling political dissent, crushing speech and ... enabling bullying".
[52] In 2023, Mike Downes stated that to the list of fraudulent practices undertaken by predatory publishers "must be added the invention or compilation of articles ostensibly written by academic scholars but in fact crafted by the publishing house in question", noting that "the majority are created under a fake name by compiling a set of plagiarized passages extracted from the specialized literature or cannibalized from within the journal's own archive".