Academic spam

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Now, I’m used to getting all the normal kinds of spam, including missives from widows of African dictators, announcements that I have just won a lottery in the UK, ads for VI!AGRR*A, mortagage offers, and so on. But I’ve recently received, twice, a new one on me: an invitation to participate in academic conferences in Slovenia and Italy, and to publish articles in some kind of fly-by-night scientific journal. As I am in academia, I imagine they probably harvested my e-mail from a publication in a legitimate journal.

Now right off, I am not too impressed with the bona fides of an organization that starts out with this kind of statement:

The description of the journal also does not inspire confidence:

I have no doubt they will get a lot of submissions “tipicaly not suitable for traditional journals.”

Seems like their own copy could stand “the editor review.” :dubious:
Anybody else, in academia or otherwise, ever receive one of these? It’s obviously a scam, but anyone know the details?
The full text follows.

2

Is good transdisciplinary? Yes! Paper you are to submit on ecommerce wood bird welcome! 500 EU only and much reviewing. Don’t wait! Be in line now for expert synergistic multidisciplinary discipline!

3

If there was ever an application for the autohinker, this is it. Paging messieur Mangetout.

4

Do you think he knows something about Internet Phylosophy?

HERE IS IPSI WEBSITE!

SEND EMAIL IF YOU LIKE TO BE INFORMED ABOUT IPSI BgD CONFERENCES!

5

[Wipes away a tear] That is a truly beautiful call.

6

Some selected verbiage from their website:

:dubious:

Neither I nor my accompanying person would think of going to a scientific conference without music at the post dinner social activities!

7

“All your papers are belong to us” :smiley:

8

So what exactly is the point of this spam? I didn’t feel like reading the whole thing, but do they ask for a “reviewing fee” or something for a paper that you submit? if all they do is say,
“You to send a paper! Up to E500 be paid for pages not to exceed 10! Reviewed by external reviewers of there are 12!” then I don’t see the scam.

9

If you read it again, you will see it says, “authors of accepted papers to pay […]” - scam!

10

The scam is the pretense that these articles will be legitimately peer-reviewed and have some real scientific standing. They talk about a review process, but it is nothing like a legitimate one. Although they say that “only 12 out of 48 papers submitted” will be published, I’m willing to bet that virtually every paper submitted is accepted. Although the “review” itself is free, you have to pay to get your paper published. This is nothing more than a kind of vanity press for would-be authors.

While some legitimate journals do request authors to pay page charges, not all of them do, and these can be waived for authors who do not have organizational fiunding to pay them.

They claim there is a list of published papers on the website, but when you click on the link, all you get is this:

It appears that this is not actually held by NASA itself, merely by an individual who works at NASA. The address given is:

As for the conferences, my guess is that they are actually set up to be junkets for officials or professors, especially ones from developing countries, who can scam their own organizations into believing they have been invited to give a paper at an international conference, and thus get their attendence paid for by their organizations.

To some extent, the organization is probably scamming naive participants who think they may be getting something worthwhile. However, it is also helping more savvy participants to scam others.

11

I’ve never heard of a fee for a legit journal, Colibri. How could the journal claim to be unbiased/scientific if payment were required? Can you give me an example? (I’m familiar with writing contests that require an entry fee, though more along the lines of $5-10 an entry.) Thanks!

12

It’s quite common. However, as I said, the fee can be waived if an author does not have institutional support.

One example in my own field is The Auk, the journal of the American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU).

Instructions for authors

13

Interesting! That’s not done in psychology, at least in the US.

14

This might be of some interest to you.

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
http://goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au/~jz/sci/

15

Thanks. That’s pretty hilarious. I didn’t know the scam-conference and scam-journal cons were so widespread.