Introducing the SICK Journal

Our journal is brand new; it doesn’t even exist yet. But I think with your help, we can make it happen. We’ve written software to find all authors of conference papers in your field. We’ll approach them through a personalized email to submit an article. The journal will be open-access, ensuring a swift impact in the field. We’d like to use your name and reputation to send the invitations on your behalf. You don’t have to do anything; we just need your permission.

Formally, you’ll also supervise the review process. However, we can take care of this as well. We have a group of students who can handle all the reviews with the help of a self-made AI review generator. They only need to check the generated texts to make sure they look credible. Before acceptance, we’ll also ask authors to cite papers from our journal so that the impact factor will go up quickly.

If the number of submitted manuscripts is still too low, we ask you to contact scientists in your network who need to put themselves in the picture, for example because they’re looking for an academic promotion, and invite them to be guest editors for a special issue. This will help increase the number of submissions, which may be useful in the journal’s startup phase. We can offer free publication slots for your guest editors.

The idea of an open-access journal is a very good one. The library budgets of universities have been under pressure for a long time, while publishers would like to increase subscription fees. There’s simply no more room for publishers to keep growing their business. However, in the open-access system, the researchers can pay the publication fees from their research budget, which is a much bigger sum per university than the library budget. In the past years, there’s been a strong lobby to make open access a reality and at this moment, it looks like the transition is taking place. A crucial factor has been to convince the research funding agencies of the open-access model, and they now start to enforce it.

So, this gives a unique opportunity for new journals. The worldwide number of researchers is growing and they all need to publish. There were simply not enough subscription journals available because they had to keep the quality high. Otherwise, the universities wouldn’t have paid for expensive subscriptions. But now, since the author pays, the model is different. The authors must publish and if funding agencies pay for it, there’s no more negative feedback in the system. New journals can appear and as long as the authors pay, it’s fine.

We foresee that our journal’s papers may not be so well cited. For this reason, we recently started a lobby against counting citations, H indices and the like. We propose an alternative measure for the quality of a scientist by a narrative description of the importance of the work. Some funding agencies have already adapted to this.

So, in short, you’ll receive a lot of prestige as editor-in-chief while we take care of most administrative processes. In the meantime, we’ll work with the funding agencies to keep the publication fees at a competitive level and guarantee our business in the future.

We look forward to hearing from you.