Nova Science Publishers

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Nova Science Publishers is an academic publisher of books, encyclopedias, handbooks, e-books and journals, based in Hauppauge, New York. While the firm publishes in several fields of academia, most of its publications cover fields of science and social science. As of January 2017, it listed 103 currently published journals. It was founded in 1985 in New York by Frank Columbus. On his death in 2010, his wife Nadya Columbus became the CEO.

Nova Science Publishers is included in the Book Citation Index. In terms of number of books published from 2005 to 2012 period, Nova ranked 4th, among the top three in 8 of 14 scientific fields (engineering, clinical medicine, human biology, animal and plant biology, geosciences, social science medicine and health, chemistry, physics and astronomy),and ranked as the 5th most prolific book publishers from 2009-2013, ranking 3rd in Engineering and Technology and 2nd in Science by numbers of books published. However, Nova had the lowest citation impact among the five most prolific publishers in both fields. In a 2011 report of twenty-one international social-science book publishers that determined penetration on international markets and mention of books in international science index systems such as Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, Nova Science Publishers ranked 17th out of 21. In a 2017 ranking study of book publishers, Nova Science Publishers was ranked ranked high on number of books published, but near the bottom for number of citations per book.

Nova has been criticized for not always evaluating authors through the academic peer review process and for republishing, at high prices, old public domain book chapters and freely-accessible government reports as if they were new. These criticisms prompted librarian Jeffrey Beall to write that in his opinion Nova Science Publishers was at the “bottom-tier” of publishers.

This post is also available in: العربية (Arabic)