In recognition of your outstanding reputation and contribution in the field of communication sciences and communication studies. We are pleased to propose your name as the Editor-in-Chief of ‘The Open Communication Journal’. After the selection your role as the journal’s Editor-in-Chief will be to solicit and submit a minimum number of ten manuscripts to the journal each year. Moreover, from time to time we would hope that you would offer your advice on how best to develop the journal reputation in order to maintain and improve its success in its field. You would also be free to invite new editorial board members for the journal who wish to play an active editorial role. For all the manuscripts that you submit to the journal, for the first ten that are published, we will pay you an annual royalty of 5% of all fees received on these manuscripts.

We expect that Editor-in-Chief, Associate Editors, Co-Editors in an Open Access Journal will submit at least one article per year which will be published ABSOLUTELY FREE OF CHARGE. Beside, each and every submission from Editor-in-Chief will be published free of cost. Of course, the submissions will not be a guarantee for publication but these submissions will also be processed through normal peer review process.

Since the launch of the new open access journal entitled “The Open Communication Journal” there has been a lot of interest in the journal from both authors and readers. The journal is freely available at no cost to the readers via the journal’s website http://www.tocommj.org. We expect that this year the number of submitted manuscripts to the journal will rapidly increase and that the journal will establish itself internationally.

Your term as the Editor-in-Chief would be initially for two years which is renewable by mutual agreement. We hope you will consider this offer and look forward to receive your positive reply. Could you please reply to me by return email at email: editor@benthamopen.org within 24 hours after receipt of this offer along with your detailed CV and list of publications so that it can be sent to the Advisory Board for evaluation?

We look forward to hearing from you soon.

With kind regards,

Yours sincerely,

BENTHAM OPEN

I consider the mail disturbing. Scholars must be very careful with this kind of message.

Wow. I just had a look at Bentham’s website. Your story would actually be less bizarre and disturbing if this company didn’t already have nearly a hundred journals up and running — including Anthropology — all with real editors and enormous editorial boards of something like sixty members. Given that they’re inviting people to become editors using this spam-like form letter, I’m surprised that they have managed to get so many people on board. I guess everyone wants their 5%!

Since refereeing the articles is not part of the editor’s job, whose is it? Is that also done in house or are these journals simply not peer-reviewed at all?