Over the past week, many authors and researchers have received threatening emails with dubious content from a predatory company and scammers with the purpose of deception and intimidation.
The letter stated: “In September-October 2020, Scopus will remove all paid journals from the database. Together with the deletion of journals, the articles published in them will be deleted, there will be no indexing of such articles in the Scopus database".
We want to warn you that this statement is absolutely absurd
1. Stopping the indexing of all paid journals is against Scopus' publishing policy
Scientific publishing is an honest and open business. The dominant part of the journals in the scientometric Scopus database are paid and take a publication fee from the author or from the readers, if this is a closed access publication. Thus, this statement, which was voiced in the letter, does not correspond to reality.
2. After the indexing of the journal is stopped, articles and journals are not deleted from the scientometric Scopus database
Scopus does indeed stop indexing certain journals when they are unethical. But, if the article has already been indexed, it remains in the database. Consider, for example, the following situation: a journal has been publishing research papers for 20 years for free, but eventually decides to switch to a paid business model. Then, according to the scammers, due to the fact that the publication has become paid, all of its articles, which by this time may already be tens of thousands, will be deleted from the database. Such a provocation sounds extremely ridiculous.
3. Official information
Our specialists are constantly in correspondence with representatives from Scopus, monitor the official website and social networks of this database, therefore we would like to assure you that Scopus has not provided any official or unofficial statements about the termination of indexing of all paid journals and articles. The information that was in the letter is knowingly false.
Unfortunately, this letter is only intended to mislead the scientific community
Therefore, we urge researchers to be careful and not to trust false information and suggestions, to study the information individually or contact trusted specialists in the scientific and publication field. And also, when working with companies, check their official registration, the presence and open work of offices, an official Agreement, where all the conditions for joint work are spelled out in order to protect oneself from unfavourable cooperation.
Be careful and do not trust suspicious emails!