The weirdest thing about the AJPH story

Earlier today I posted a weird email that began with “You are receiving this notice because you have published a paper with the American Journal of Public Health within the last few years” and continued with a sleazy attempt to squeeze $1000 out of me so that an article that I sent them for free could be available to the public. $1000 might seem like a lot, but they assured me that “we are extending this limited time offer of open access at a steeply discounted rate.” Sort of like a Vegematic but without that set of Ginsu knives thrown in for free.

But then when I was responding to comments, I realized that . . . I didn’t actually remember ever publishing anything in that journal. It’s not on my list of 100+ journals. I did a search on my published papers page and couldn’t find anything closer than the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health (and that was not within the last few years). I checked Google Scholar. And then I went straight to the AJPH webpage and searched on Gelman. But all I could find were a bunch of papers by an Anna C. Gelman (no relation that I know of) from the 1960s:

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So now I really don’t know what was going on. Maybe there’s a paper in press that I’m not aware of? It’s a good thing I didn’t send them the thousand bucks!

11 thoughts on “The weirdest thing about the AJPH story

  1. I’m disappointed that you received such a tricky, sleazy email from AJPH. This is especially disconcerting because AJPH is considered one of (if not the) premier journal of Public Health, which itself a huge field with broad impact around the world.

    Is it possible that this is a ruse, in that it was sent by individuals only pretending to represent AJPH?

    John

  2. I bet you were on their list for this article:

    http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2005.079400?journalCode=ajph

    Which you didn’t write! But:

    “This research was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (grantR01HD35301). Jennifer Borkowski and Ofira Schwartz-Soicher created the data file which was used in the analyses. Julien Teitler and Andrew Gelman provided helpful suggestions.”

    LOL.

    FWIW Brian Selzer does seem to be a real person with that title at that org. So if it’s a fake/hoax/scam, it’s both odd and fastidious.

  3. I got the same email, and I have also not published there. I assumed it was because I’m in their author registration system because I unsuccessfully submitted a paper to them. I was glad to be rejected, because after submitting I learned that the final manuscript version must be submitted in MS Word, with all graphs done in MS Excel (I’m not joking). Nevertheless, their email asking for $1,000 for a rejected manuscript really added insult to injury.

    • Well, Eric, they should at least give you an even more steeply discounted rate!

      I must admit that I find “steeply discounted rate” very irritating and rather sleazy — they didn’t have the policy before, so how is a new price a “steeply discounted rate”?

      This is like the email I received from LivingSocial today, providing what seems to be a discounted price on items with no true price:

      “Scoring two goals in 17 seconds was an intense, remarkable ending to the Hawks’s championship season — and an autographed hockey puck would make it even sweeter:

      • $149 ($299 value) for a licensed 2013 Stanley Cup Champions puck signed by Patrick Kane or Jonathan Toews
      • $119 ($249 value) for a licensed 2013 Stanley Cup Final puck signed by Duncan Keith or Marián Hossa
      • $109 ($219 value) for a licensed 2013 Stanley Cup Final puck signed by Andrew Shaw”
      (etc.)

  4. I am curious about why and how anyone would consider making such a payment and what percentage actually do?

    Do journals get a worthwhile rate of return on efforts/loss of good will?

  5. AJPH has published articles generally laudatory of Che Guevara and comes across as having something of a socialist slant so surely there is some mistake that they are asking authors for money to sell their own works.

  6. Some very good public health journals ask for money. AJE, which has an impact factor of about 5, actually charges a page rate. They were publishing my dissertation research, which wasn’t grant-funded, so I had to apply for a waiver. I recall that they tried to bill me for $1500 even after getting the waiver, and I had to resolve that. Medical journals offer the option to submit either open access (which costs money) or not open access (free but paper is delayed in release to general public by maximum allowed by law.)

    Their current website said they charge $95 per page over 3 pages, so my 10 page paper would have been under $700, so I’m not sure how they got $1500, but I do remember it being over $1000.
    http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/aje/for_authors/general.html

  7. Btw, not to justify it at all. I have just gotten used to these things. If I had known that most public health positions didn’t pay salaries, I would have gotten a PhD in economics. Relatedly, when I was a postdoc, if I wanted a phone in my office, I had to pay the $500 yearly cost out of research funds. When I moved to a new office, there was already a phone there, and I used it. The line owner eventually discovered that they had forgotten to remove the phone from their grant, and they tried to charge me for the months of use. They must have realized how petty that seemed.

  8. I’d love to see someone work out why it is that public health, of all things, is so unavailable to the public.

    The journal papers are paywalled.
    The practitioners are poorly paid.
    Authors have to pay for the public to be able to see their papers.

    Who benefits from public health being kept away from the public?

    Try weighing papers funded by industry against public health papers for availability, access, influence …

    Just curious how it all works.

  9. This could eventually become a decent phishing scheme. Most up-and-coming academics would be happy to have articles go open access for a more modest fee ($50 or $100?). The phishers could reap quite a few credit card numbers with the extra 3digits through such a scam. Doing it well would take a little work. It is something else to be wary about in the digital world.

  10. The journal won’t take the money. I told them I wanted to pay for the open access and gave them your name. They replied that I didn’t have a published article and should disregard the notice. Then, they directed me to an FAQ page.

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