Sketchy invitations

I recently received an email inviting me to submit an article to a recently-started journal and even promising an honorarium if it published my article in the near future. I have a lot of ideas in the journal's field of exploratory pharmacology, so I sat down and started drafting a short commentary and hypothesis tonight. Then I noticed an English error in the invitation email.

Being a curious type, I started to look further into this new journal. The alleged publisher has three other journals, all started within the past year or two. They claim that one of the journals has already begun being indexed on Pubmed. So I checked Pubmed. No, they're not indexed. And very few journal articles have been published according to the websites of their four journals. This claimed publisher appears to be a scam, for what purpose I know not. Perhaps they were going to reject my article and then later agree to publish it for a fee. But if it's not a reputable and/or indexed journal, their throwing my article up on their little website doesn't get my article any wider audience than my blog could.

Beware of journal scams. On the bright side, though, thanks to this dubious email invitation, I forced myself to set some good ideas down into a coherent short article that I can submit elsewhere.