| Founded: | 1985 |
| Founder: | Frank H. Columbus |
| Country: | United States |
| Distribution: | Worldwide |
| Keypeople: | Nadya Gotsiridze-Columbus (President); Donna Dennis (Vice-President) |
| Publications: | Academic journals, books, encyclopedias, handbooks |
| Topics: | Science and technology, medicine and biology, social sciences |
| Genre: | Academic; STM |
| Imprints: | NOVA, NOVA Biomedical, Novinka |
| Numemployees: | 55 in-house employees |
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.[1] Nova is included in Book Citation Index (part of Web of Science Core Collection) and scopus-indexed. A prolific publisher of books, Nova has received criticism from librarians for not always subjecting its publications to academic peer review and for republishing public domain book chapters and freely-accessible government publications at high prices.
The company was founded in New York by Frank Columbus, former senior editor of Plenum Publishing.[2] His wife, Nadya Columbus, took over the firm operations upon his death in 2010.[3] While the firm publishes works in several fields of academia, most of its publications cover the fields of science, social science, and medicine.
Nova listed 100 currently published journals.[4] Since 2021, their new book publications include Digital Object Identifiers.[5] As of 2022, Nova was approved in the Norwegian register for scientific journals, series and publishers, published by the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills .[6]
Nova is included in the Book Citation Index.[7] 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 including engineering, clinical medicine, human biology, animal and plant biology, geosciences, social science medicine, health, chemistry, physics, and astronomy),[8] 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.[9]
However, it had the lowest citation impact among the five most prolific publishers in both fields.[9] In a 2017 ranking study of book publishers, Nova was ranked high on number of books published, but low on number of citations per book.[10] In 2018, it was ranked #13 on the global main publishers list of political sciences during the last 5 years.[11]
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, Nova was ranked #17.[12] A 2017 survey of national and international databases of scholarly book publishers, including the Book Citation Index, Scopus, CRIStin, JUFO, VIRTA, and SPI, 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.[13]
Nova has been criticized by librarians 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.[14] [15] [16] The publisher is classified as a vanity press on Beall's List.[17]