Hindawi is a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journals currently active in scientific, technical, and medical (STM) literature. It was founded in 1997 in Cairo, Egypt, but purchased in 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, a publishing company based in the United States. The company has its headquarters in London, an office in Cairo, and a virtual office address in New York City.
As of 2022, Hindawi publishes over 250 journals, including 64 journals indexed within the Science Citation Index Expanded, and 1 journal indexed within the Social Sciences Citation Index, with a total of 64 journals ranked with an impact factor.
Since 2007, all of Hindawi's journals have been open access and published under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). It is a founding member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, a participating publisher and supporter of the Initiative for Open Citations, and a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
In 2010, Hindawi was classified as a possible predatory publisher by Jeffrey Beall, but was removed following a successful appeal.
History
The Hindawi Publishing Corporation was founded in 1997 in Cairo by Ahmed Hindawi and his wife Nagwa Abdel-Mottaleb. The company's first journal was the International Journal of Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences, which it acquired from a prior publisher. By 2006 Hindawi Publishing owned 48 journals and had about 220 employees, and published journals in the physical and life sciences and medical research. In February 2007, Hindawi moved to a complete open access model on all of its journals. By 2007, Hindawi was publishing around 100 journals, 21 of which were ISI listed, and claimed to be second largest publisher in PubMed Central, an open access journal repository. Hindawi journals use a reviewing process that does not assign chief editors to its journals, has no hierarchy among editorial board members, and has no contractual relationship with the editorial board members. The company had a 40% article acceptance rate. Article publication fees averaged $800, varying by journal and page count, being significantly less than prices charged by major open access competitors including BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science.
Two corporations currently act under the name of Hindawi: Hindawi Limited, based in London, and Hindawi Publishing Corporation (HPC), based in Cairo. The original publishing company, Hindawi Publishing Corporation, was founded in Cairo in 1997 by Ahmed Hindawi and Nagwa Abdelmottaleb and now acts merely as a publishing services provider to Hindawi Ltd. Hindawi Ltd was founded in London in 2013 by Ahmed Hindawi and had acquired all the assets and intellectual property of Hindawi Publishing Corporation by 2017.
In January, 2021, John Wiley & Sons acquired Hindawi Limited for an enterprise value of $298 million.
In the fall of 2022, Hindawi announced the retraction of more than 500 articles in 16 of its scientific journals because of cheating involving some of its editors and peer reviewers.
Assessment of Hindawi journals
Between 2009 and 2011, the number of Hindawi journals nearly doubled, and Hindawi's output increased from 2,500 to 13,000 articles per year. By 2011, Hindawi was publishing 300 journals, and had a staff of over 450 people. The growth of the company has come from publishing new start-up journals, as well as acquisitions of established journals such as Psyche, an entomological journal founded in 1874. Two major factors facilitating the company's growth have been the low labor costs and well-educated middle class of Cairo. Hindawi's publishing portfolio includes 233 journals.
, the Norwegian Scientific Index lists 195 Hindawi journals, one of which are level X (dubious i.e. possibly predatory), 18 marked level 0 (not academic), the rest marked level 1 (standard academic).
In March 2023, multiple Hindawi journals were delisted from the Web of Science for concerns with their editorial practices.
Assessments and responses to controversial articles
In 2010, a subset of Hindawi journals were included in a list of suspected predatory open access publishers by Jeffrey Beall; however Beall later removed Hindawi from his list after re-evaluating the company, calling it a "borderline case". Beall has also criticized Hindawi for representing the offshoring of scholarly publishing, a view which has been criticized as neocolonialist.