Bentham Science Publishers is a commercial STM publisher founded in 1994 by chemist Atta-ur-Rahman and Matthew Honan, headquartered in the Sharjah Airport International Free Zone in the United Arab Emirates. Its portfolio of roughly 130+ journals is unusually concentrated: most titles sit in medicinal chemistry, pharmacology, drug discovery, and clinical medicine, and many are review-focused 'Current...' journals - Current Medicinal Chemistry, Current Pharmaceutical Design, Current Drug Targets, Current Neuropharmacology, and dozens of siblings.

Bentham occupies a mid-tier, sometimes-debated position in scholarly publishing. Its core subscription journals are long-established, indexed in Scopus and Web of Science, and widely cited in pharma research. At the same time, its former free-standing open-access arm, Bentham Open, drew heavy criticism a decade and a half ago and landed on Jeffrey Beall's list - history that still shapes how the publisher is perceived. This guide covers what Bentham actually publishes, what it costs, how peer review works, how to submit, and how to evaluate an individual Bentham journal before you commit a manuscript.

~130+ peer-reviewed journals, plus e-book series, organized around a few clusters:

• The 'Current...' series - the core brand: review-oriented subscription and hybrid journals across medicinal chemistry, pharmacology, cancer research, neuroscience, and clinical specialties. These carry most of Bentham's impact factors and citations.
• Gold open-access journals - a smaller set of fully-OA titles publishing under CC BY or CC BY-NC licenses.
• Bentham Open (archived) - the former stand-alone OA imprint of roughly 40 'The Open ... Journal' titles. The benthamopen.com site now redirects to Bentham Open Archives; treat these titles as legacy content rather than active submission venues.

Subject coverage is dominated by chemistry, pharmacology, and medicine, with smaller offerings in engineering, materials, and computer science.

Bentham offers three routes:

• Gold OA - fully open-access journals with APCs; articles published under CC BY or CC BY-NC.
• Hybrid OA (Open Access Plus) - pay an APC to make a single article open in an otherwise subscription journal.
• Green OA - self-archiving of the accepted manuscript is permitted; check the per-journal embargo terms.

Bentham states that waivers and discounts are available for authors from low- and middle-income countries on request. Prices are revised periodically and Bentham's fee pages change - always check the specific journal's fees-and-charges page before submitting. Transformative (read-and-publish) agreements exist but are limited compared with the large TA portfolios of Elsevier or Springer Nature; ask your library.

• Model: single-anonymized peer review is standard across the portfolio - reviewers know author identities, authors do not know reviewers.
• Editorial structure: each journal has an international editorial board; flagship titles are led by established researchers in the field.
• Turnaround: varies widely by title, from a few weeks to several months to first decision. The optional paid Quick Track service accelerates handling on participating journals, which is worth knowing about but has also drawn criticism - paying it does not affect the acceptance decision.
• Ethics: Bentham Science is a COPE member and states adherence to COPE guidelines on misconduct, retractions, and authorship disputes.

1. Pick the journal. Browse the portfolio at benthamscience.com and shortlist by scope, indexing, and cost.
2. Verify indexing yourself. Check the exact title in Scopus, the Web of Science Master Journal List, and (for biomedical work) PubMed/MEDLINE - coverage varies title by title.
3. Read the author guidelines. Bentham journals use a numbered (Vancouver-style) citation format; per-journal guidelines specify structure and word limits.
4. Prepare your manuscript. SciSpace hosts Bentham formats and templates you can write in directly.
5. Submit via Bentham's Manuscript Processing System (MPS). Bentham runs its own proprietary submission platform; create an account, upload files, and track status there.

Any honest guide to Bentham Science has to address its history. In 2009, a graduate student got a nonsense manuscript generated by the SCIgen software accepted (against payment of the fee) at a Bentham Open journal, and the same year another Bentham Open title published a widely criticized paper without proper editorial sign-off, prompting an editor-in-chief's resignation. Jeffrey Beall subsequently listed Bentham Open on his registry of questionable open-access publishers, and the company has also been criticized for aggressive email solicitation of editors and authors.

Set against that: the subscription-side 'Current...' journals long predate those incidents, are indexed in Scopus and Web of Science - 60+ Bentham journals hold JCR impact factors - and Bentham is a COPE member with published ethics policies. The Bentham Open imprint itself has since been wound down into an archive. The practical advice is title-level diligence: judge the specific journal you are targeting by its current indexing, editorial board, and published output, not the publisher's name alone.