OMICS Publishing Group is a predatory publisher of open access academic journals. It started publishing its first journal in 2008. By 2015, it claimed over 700 journals, although about half of them were defunct. Its subsidiaries and brands include Allied Academies, Andrew John Publishing Inc., Ashdin Publishing, Conference Series LLC LTD, EuroSciCon LTD, Hilaris Publishing, Insight Medical Publishing (iMedPub) LTD, International Online Medical Council (IOMC), International Research Journals, IT Medical Team, Longdom Publishing SL, Open Access Journals, Meetings International, Prime Scholars, Pulsus Group, Research & Reviews, Scholars Central, SciTechnol, Trade Science Inc, Life Science Events and Walsh Medical Media. OMICS has come under attack by numerous academics and the United States government over the validity of the peer review by OMICS journals, the appropriateness of its fees and marketing, and the apparent advertising of the names of scientists as journal editors or conference speakers without their knowledge or permission. 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. In August 2016, OMICS became the first academic publisher to be sued by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for deceptive practices; nearly three years later, the FTC was awarded a summary judgement of over US$50 million. OMICS has responded to criticisms by avowing a commitment to open access publishing, claiming that detractors are traditional subscription-based publishers who feel threatened by their open-access publishing model. It responded to the FTC suit by maintaining that their practices were legal and claiming that corporate interests were driving the suit. It has also threatened a prominent critic, Jeffrey Beall, with a $1 billion lawsuit for defamation.
History OMICS Publishing Group was founded in 2007 by Srinubabu Gedela, who remains the company's director. He founded OMICS because of his difficulty in accessing high-cost journal contents as a PhD student. It started its first open-access journal, the Journal of Proteomics & Bioinformatics, in 2008. In 2012, OMICS Group had more than 200 journal titles, about 60% of which had no content. By 2015, it claimed over 700 titles, but about half of them were defunct. Several OMICS journals have names similar to existing publications. For instance, BioMed Central established the Journal of Biomedical Science in 1994, while OMICS established the Journal of Biomedical Sciences in 2012. OMICS employed around 2,000 people. In 2016, the company had revenue of $11.6 million and generated a profit of about $1.2 million. The Government of India has waived taxes whilst granting subsidized land for the construction of new headquarters.
Publishing activities OMICS operates on a gold open access model, wherein the author pays for publication and the publisher makes the articles available for free. As well as publication fees, OMICS charges a withdrawal fee for manuscripts that are withdrawn five or more days after submission. Such withdrawal fees are not levied by non-predatory publishers, and have been criticized as unethical and as discouraging researchers from making post-submission corrections to their work. In addition to publishing journals, OMICS also organizes conferences. In 2017, about 3,000 such conferences were organized. The conference arm makes up about 60% of OMICS' revenue. In 2012 OMICS launched an additional group of 53 additional journals under the brand name 'SciTechnol', however as of 2021 the SciTechnol website does not disclose this relationship.
Criticism of publishing practices
OMICS is widely regarded as a predatory publisher. It has been subject to widespread criticism, notably by Jeffrey Beall, who included OMICS in his list of "potential, possible, or probable predatory" publishers. Among the criticism leveled at OMICS are that its journals are not actually peer-reviewed as advertised, often contain mistakes, and that its fees are excessive. OMICS says that its activities are legitimate and ethical, and that the quality of its editorial control does need improvement. Other criticisms of OMICS include the publication of pseudoscientific articles, deceptive marketing practices, targeting of young investigators or those in lower-income regions, and holding papers hostage by disallowing their withdrawal (preventing them from being published by other journals). 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. One such editor-in-chief was contacted by Science, and he stated that he had never handled any papers; in an interview with The Hindu, another said he had not been informed of his purported editorship. Other academics have said that OMICS published articles unaltered in spite of their request for revisions. 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. One author received an invoice for $2,700 after her paper was accepted; this fee was not mentioned in the email message OMICS sent her to solicit a submission. In 2012, while one OMICS journal rejected a paper after the reviewer noticed it was plagiarized from one of his own co-authored papers, another OMICS journal published the same paper later that year. When the reviewer again pointed this out, the paper was removed from OMICS' website in 2014, but no official retraction was posted. In 2013, an OMICS journal accepted a bogus and obviously flawed publication submitted as part of a sting operation by Science. Critics assert that the main purpose of the publisher is commercial rather than academic. In September 2014, PubMed Central blacklisted OMICS journals, claiming serious concerns over OMICS' publishing practices. In 2017, Scopus delisted several OMICS journals for "publication concerns". 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. They were also the major sponsors of OMICS conferences.
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