Published August 11, 2026 · Filed under Research notes
A strange milestone for an open dataset: on the same day, two different "journals" emailed to say our SSRN preprint, A Longitudinal Panel of GitHub Engineering Velocity for Venture-Backed Startups: is "very impressive and fits within the scope" of their publication.
One of them publishes on nuclear energy.
The other opened with "Dear Dr. The Data Nerd": flattering a pseudonym it scraped straight off the SSRN author field.
Both emails are reproduced below verbatim, with the tells annotated. If you publish anything on a preprint server, you will get these too, so treat this page as a field guide.
Receipt #1: The nuclear-energy journal that loves VC data
"Dear Professor, Best wishes from the Archives of Nuclear Energy Science and Technology, ISSN:3067-1965. We came through your article entitled 'A Longitudinal Panel of GitHub Engineering Velocity for Venture-Backed Startups'. Your research is very impressive and fits within the scope of the journal. I would like to invite you to publish the full-length paper for publication in our journal. It will be appreciated if you could submit your paper on or before August 25th, 2026."
Receipt #2: The "reminder" for an email that never came
"Dear Dr. The Data Nerd, … Wishes from the 'Letters in Economic Research Updates (ISSN: 3068-9236)' journal. As we haven't received any response from you, we would like to remind you once again to submit your article, as it perfectly aligned with our journal scope. If you are interested in ensuring consideration, please submit your article via this email as an attachment."
Why this happens to preprints
Predatory outlets scrape SSRN, arXiv, and ResearchGate for fresh preprints, then mass-mail the listed authors. The economics are simple: flattery is free, and a fraction of recipients, often early-career researchers under publish-or-perish pressure, pay the article-processing charge that appears after "acceptance". The invitations target the author, not the research; that is why a nuclear-energy journal will happily claim a venture-capital dataset "fits within the scope".
Our paper is a useful canary precisely because its author is pseudonymous. Any email addressing "Dr. The Data Nerd" or "Professor" self-certifies that no human being was involved in the invitation.
The red-flag checklist
Before responding to any journal invitation, check:
- Scope: does the journal's subject have anything to do with your paper?
- Salutation: do they know who you actually are, or is it "Dear Professor / Dr. [scraped string]"?
- Provenance: did they say where they found the paper, and does a claimed "reminder" match a real earlier email?
- Submission channel: manuscript system with tracking, or "reply with an attachment"?
- Deadline: unsolicited invitations with countdown deadlines are sales funnels, not calls for papers.
- ISSN ≠ legitimacy: an ISSN is a serial number, not a quality mark. Check DOAJ or Scopus indexing instead.
- Fees: if the article-processing charge only appears after acceptance, that's the product being sold, you.
The paper they didn't read
For the humans (and agents) who do want the actual research: the preprint releases a quarterly longitudinal panel of GitHub engineering-velocity signals across venture-backed startups, commit velocity, contributor growth, and repository expansion, with the full dataset open under CC BY 4.0.
- Preprint: SSRN abstract 6606558
- Dataset: Zenodo, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19650920
- 30 findings, cited to section: signals.gitdealflow.com/research
- Live signals derived from the same methodology: free JSON API
It remains free, open, and, as of this week, apparently impressive enough for the nuclear-energy literature.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a predatory journal invitation?
An unsolicited email from a pay-to-publish outlet that flatters any paper it scrapes from preprint servers, invites a "full-length submission", and later reveals an article-processing charge. Tells: generic salutations, scope mismatch, artificial deadlines, and submission by email attachment instead of a manuscript system.
How do you know these were automated scrapes?
One email addressed the author as "Dear Dr. The Data Nerd", a pseudonym lifted verbatim from the SSRN author field. A nuclear-energy journal invited a venture-capital dataset paper, and a "reminder" email had no original preceding it.
Does an ISSN mean a journal is legitimate?
No. An ISSN is a serial identifier any periodical can register, not a quality mark. Check DOAJ, Scopus, or your library's indexed lists instead.
Which paper were these invitations targeting?
"A Longitudinal Panel of GitHub Engineering Velocity for Venture-Backed Startups: Dataset and Early Observations", an open CC BY 4.0 preprint on SSRN (abstract 6606558) with the dataset on Zenodo (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19650920).