publishing smoothly with Alice

A colleague, who is Editor-In-Chief of a journal, forwarded me an email he recently received.  Wow!

Although written with a degree of plausible deniability ("we just want you to help with the review process", as if organising the review process isn't basically what editors do anyway), it's actually pretty blatant.

Dear [[COLLEAGUE'S NAME]]

We are an academic research institution in China. Our authors and clients come from universities all over the world, so we have many high quality articles in related fields such as computer science, engineering, materials science, physic, management science. We know your reputation in academia, so we look forward to working with you. We know the rules of cooperation, so we can ensure the confidentiality of cooperation and achieve mutual benefit.We are also keen to help editors cite their journal literature and help journals better improve their impact factors and ratings.

After 10 years of development,we have accumulated more than 60 000 customers (doctors and college teachers), including but not limited to computer, materials science, physic, chemistry, communication, medicine, electronics, automation, management science, mathematical application, ecological environment, electromechanical and other majors. Most authors expect their articles to be acceptrd and published in SCI/EI/SSCI journals as soon as possible.We have successfully published hundreds of articles in journals such as Elesvier, Springer, IEEE, IET etc.

We know that you are responsible for many special issues of Springer，IET, SAGE，Welly and Elsevier publisher. And we hope to establish long-term, stable and friendly cooperation with you.You can get a more comprehensive understanding of us through our official website:

[[[REDACTED URL]]]

Our cooperation is to help more authors publish their articles more professionally and smoothly. The process is roughly like this：1、We will select articles suitable for your journal (ensure the quality and scope of the article) and send them to you for confirmation of submission.

2、After the submission, please help our article to be accepted smoothly. （please help with initial check，review process and so on）

3、After the article is accepted, we will give you a fee. If you agree to cooperate, I will discuss the fee with you again.

If you think we can cooperate also, you can add my WhatsApp or WeChat at any time.

Waiting for your reply. I think we're going to be great partners.

My WhatsApp: [[[REDACTED]]]

Sincerely

Alice

Thanks, but no thanks, "Alice".