Nova Science Publishers is an academic publisher of books, encyclopedias, handbooks, e-books and journals, based in Hauppauge, New York. It was founded in 1985 in New York by Frank Columbus, former senior editor of Plenum Publishing, whose wife, Nadya Columbus, took over upon his death in 2010. While the firm publishes works in several fields of academia, most of its publications cover the fields of science, social science, and medicine. As of February 2018, it listed 100 currently published journals. In 2018 NOVA was ranked on the 13th place global main publishers of political sciences during the last 5 years. Nova Science Publishers is included in the Book Citation Index. In terms of number of books published from 2005 to 2012, Nova ranked 4th. They ranked in the top three in 8 of 14 scientific fields, and ranked as the 5th most prolific book publisher from 2009-2013, ranking 3rd in Engineering and Technology and 2nd in Science by numbers of books published. They were also ranked as the 6th most productive publisher, according to a University of Granada study. However, Nova had the lowestcitation impact among the five most prolific publishers in both fields. Many academicians and evaluation boards do not consider publications to be of sufficient quality in the process of recruitment and promotion due to the low quality of Nova Science Publishers Inc. Presently, the quality of academic publications by Nova Science Publishers Inc. has been quite poor.
Controversies and criticism
Nova has been criticized for not always evaluating authors through the academic peer review process and for republishing old public domain book chapters and freely-accessible government reports at high prices. These criticisms prompted librarian Jeffrey Beall to write that in his opinion Nova Science Publishers was in the "bottom-tier" of publishers. A recent survey of national and international databases of scholarly book publishers identified Nova as one of a "core of publishers that are indexed in all five" of the information systems surveyed. This "core" contained 46 out of the 3,765 publishers identified. 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 high on number of books published, but near the bottom for number of citations per book. A 2018 report by the same author now indicates that Nova ranks among the top half among 51 for 1.overall global standing of the company; 2.company as a factor on the market; 3.company impact on the global political and economic debate; 4.successfully distributing best-sellers; 5. impact on the scholarly community; 6.successfully distributing production to more than 50 global Worldcat libraries; 7.output during the last 5 years; 8. outstanding academic quality. But also as of 2018, Nova has been removed from the Norwegian list of approved scientific publishing channels.
