Kowsar Publishing

Kowsar - now Brieflands - is an STM publishing company which was founded in 2002 by S.M. Miri and Seyed-Moayed Alavian. Kowsar journals have been peer reviewed and are published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution License Non Commercial 4.0.^[2] The company is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics.^[3]

Brieflands is an official member of ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID), supporting accurate author identification and metadata integrity through persistent digital identifiers.^[4] It preserves 69 of its e-journals in Portico, a trusted digital archiving service, ensuring long-term accessibility and content stability.^[5] As a member of the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), Brieflands also facilitates collective copyright licensing to support the legal and ethical reuse of its published materials.^[6] Furthermore, several Brieflands journals are indexed in major international databases such as Web of Science (SCIE and ESCI), Scopus, and PubMed Central, including Hepatitis Monthly, Innovative Journal of Pediatrics, and the International Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism, reflecting its adherence to rigorous academic publishing standards.^[7]

The publisher has been referenced in broader academic discussions about journal quality and was previously listed on Beall’s List, which was discontinued in 2017 due to concerns over insufficient evidence and a lack of transparency in its evaluation criteria.^[8] Importantly, the two cited studies did not specifically assess this publisher, but rather analyzed samples of journals that had appeared on Beall’s List.^[9] Furthermore, the author of the second study^[10] has been noted to have had a conflict of interest involving this publisher, which may have influenced the objectivity of the findings. In 2018, PubMed Central conducted a re-evaluation of 16 Kowsar journals indexed in the database; 14 were found to "no longer satisfy PMC's Scientific Quality Standard" and were accordingly delisted.^[11] Some of its journals, like Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, incorrectly claimed to be included in the Directory of Open Access Journals.^[12] The issue has been resolved in December 2019.^[13]

In 2022, the company - formerly known as KowsarMedical Publishing - became Brieflands.