Towards a Better Understanding of Predatory Conferences in Research: When Academic Conferences are Misrepresented and Don’t Organise

There is need for consumer-protection authorities to become aware of predatory conferences. Many countries protect consumer rights with public bodies that allow consumers to flag if a service or good is not what they think it is. Clearly, academic conferences are being sold misleadingly. And yet, according to Nature’s reporting, there is low awareness of predatory conferences among consumer-protection authorities. It will need research leaders to do something about that.

Imagine being invited to speak at an eye-health conference in London. You arrive to find that the other delegates are specialists in entirely separate disciplines, such as dentistry, pharmacology and midwifery. Your fellow attendees, who have travelled from around the world, are all expecting to attend conferences in their specific fields. But it’s not clear which conference is being held, why some sessions have been cancelled and why no conference organizers are present. Everyone has been deceived.

Academic conferences are one of the main routes for career development in research. The best events have been reviewed by programme committees. There are enough time for discussion in talks and panels. There is plenty of time for networking, and quality food isn’t an issue.

Third, research communities should more regularly publicize information on good conference practices, such as the necessity of thorough peer review, and provide links to trusted organizations.

What to spot a predatory conference, and what science needs to do about them: a guide from Molla, a geneticist, meets Knowledge E at the Indian Rice Research Institute

Unlike some of his colleagues, Molla, who is a plant geneticist at India’s National Rice Research Institute in Cuttack, often gets invitations to present papers at conferences focused on topics unrelated to his field.

• Check whether the venue is listed. If so, contact the venue to ensure that the event is taking place. If not, ask the organizers for clarification, and be suspicious of noncommittal responses or poor communication.

Contacts that are only available through a texting app, or unofficial looking e-mail contacts, should be looked out for.

Beall, who in 2017 took down his list of predatory journals and publishers under what he has called intense employer pressure, thinks that lists of high-quality conferences in each discipline could be helpful. A conference-evaluation checklist called ‘Think. Check. Attend.’, run by Knowledge E, a research consultancy based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, assists researchers in assessing conference quality.

Checking previous conference proceedings (if they exist) could also give early-career researchers a sense of the event’s academic quality. There are online discussion forums where people can get information about conferences.

Source: How to spot a predatory conference, and what science needs to do about them: a guide

Communication failure of an academic researcher at the 2021 European Society of Radiology congress in Daejeon: Investigating a fake conference organizer

In April 2021, Dikoma Shungu, a radiology researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, received an invitation to present a paper at the November 2021 European Society of Medicine (ESMED) Congress in Vienna, which he accepted. But later, after he clicked on a link to the website, it was flagged as suspicious by his university’s information-technology team. Subsequent searches revealed that the conference organizer had used a photo of him without permission on the website and that he was promoted as a featured speaker. Shungu had asked the conference organizers questions but they didn’t reply. He says he decided it was a fake conference after that. So he asked his credit-card company to refund the conference fee.

The Nature reporter talked to a person who attended the General Assembly of the ESMED in Berlin, and remembered a researcher who gave a presentation to an empty room.

This wasn’t the end of the story, however. Shungu says that he was never invited to be a speaker at the General Assembly, and that his presentation abstract and photo were used without his consent.

Some researchers were criticized by the investigation because they found out that some of the speakers sent to conference sessions that they weren’t qualified to speak at, didn’t actually take place. The speaker who died was a keynote speaker.

“If a conference is truthful and accurate in its communications and materials, then it may not be of exceptional quality, but it is not predatory,” the representative adds. “If any one of our past clients is dissatisfied with the service they received they may contact us using the contact form or e-mail on our website, and we promise to make it right.”

James has said that if you look at the name of the conference company, you can see it’s track record.

In 2019, South Korea’s education ministry introduced a requirement for the country’s universities to vet academics’ overseas conference travel. The decision came after a report revealed that 574 professors at 90 universities had participated in conferences that it called “weak”.

The KISTI is based in Daejeon and administers the information platform Scholarly Ecosystem Against Fake Publishing Environment (SAFE). SAFE is a public service that worldwide monitors suspected insolvent academic journals and predatory academic events. The SAFE map tracks the numbers and locations of conferences organized from 2015 onward by OMICS and the World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology (WASET), another company that is often described as predatory.

WASET rejects the suggestion that its events are weak or suspect. The organization has an open-access database of its proceedings and has a thorough review process for papers. When this article was published, OMICS had not responded after being contacted about its inclusion on the SAFE list.

The Czech Academy of Sciences came up with the idea to stop predatory practices. The module on predatory practices is included in the course and has been completed by nearly 300 people thus far, said Tereza mov, an open-science advocate at OpenAIRE.