Scientific Articles Accepted (Personal Checks, Too)

[groovedaddy]

The scientists who were recruited to appear at a conference called Entomology-2013 thought they had been selected to make a presentation to the leading professional association of scientists who study insects.

But they found out the hard way that they were wrong. The prestigious, academically sanctioned conference they had in mind has a slightly different name: Entomology 2013 (without the hyphen). The one they had signed up for featured speakers who were recruited by e-mail, not vetted by leading academics. Those who agreed to appear were later charged a hefty fee for the privilege, and pretty much anyone who paid got a spot on the podium that could be used to pad a résumé.

“I think we were duped,” one of the scientists wrote in an e-mail to the Entomological Society.

Those scientists had stumbled into a parallel world of pseudo-academia, complete with prestigiously titled conferences and journals that sponsor them. Many of the journals and meetings have names that are nearly identical to those of established, well-known publications and events.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/health/for-scientists-an-exploding-world-of-pseudo-academia.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130408

[TxDemChem]

1. I get mail like this all the time at work

I have nothing to present at any conference, but it's amazing how many of these sham conferences there are. Unless I see a conference tied to a well-known organization, such as American Chemical Society, I just dump the info in the trash.

[dimbear]

2. This goes back a long long way. That fellow that offered to publish your long forgotten thesis

for a small fee was one of the early adopters.

[DetlefK]

3. For example: Journal of Cosmology

They published several articles of Wickramasinghe how he claimed he found bacteria in a meteorite.

1.) Those articles were accepted for publishing within less than a week, maybe just one or two days. A normal reviewing-process takes weeks.
2.) Those articles were incomplete. The data was okay but inconclusive and far too many questions remained unanswered. And a reviewing-process would stumble upon this and demand the article to be retracted, revised and sent in anew.

[Victor_c3]

4. I've been working on a business plan for a non-accredited online university

If I were to put together a couple of phony conferences like this I could add some clout to my phony university.