Predatory conference

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Predatory conferences or predatory meetings are meetings set up to appear as legitimate scientific conferences but which are exploitative as they do not provide proper editorial control over presentations, and advertising can include claims of involvement of prominent academics who are, in fact, uninvolved. [1] [2] They are an expansion of the predatory publishing business model, which involves the creation of academic publications built around an exploitative business model that generally involves charging publication fees to authors without providing the editorial and publishing services associated with legitimate journals. [1] [2]

Contents

Overview

Jeffrey Beall coined the term "predatory meetings" as analogous to "predatory publications" and explains that the business model involves "conferences organized by revenue-seeking companies that want to exploit researchers' need to build their vitas with conference presentations and papers in the published proceedings or affiliated journals," these affiliated journals being predatory journals. [3] Early-career academics and scholars from developing countries are the most likely to be at risk of exploitation by predatory meetings, just as is the case with the predatory publications. [4] Predatory meetings have been reported to accept submissions of very poor quality, [5] to claim that uninvolved academics are on the organising committee, [1] and to deliberately mimic well-established conferences to gain submissions. [6] [7] Organisers of predatory meetings include the World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology (WASET) and the OMICS Publishing Group; however, there are many other organizations directly targeting students, faculty, and other researchers with invitations to participate in this type of conferences. The Caltech Library website has a list of questionable conferences and conference organizers. [8] In 2016 the Federal Trade Commission launched a case against OMICS regarding its predatory journals and conferences [9] and in 2019 a federal judge ruled that OMICS made deceptive claims to academics and researchers about the nature of their conferences and publications and ordered Srinubabu Gedela (CEO and owner of OMICS) and his companies to pay more than 50 million dollars. [10] [11] The legal representative for Omics contended that the accusation was unjust, asserting that Omics had filed a $3.11 billion lawsuit against the US Federal Trade Commission. The lawsuit alleges that the Commission's actions resulted in both financial losses and damage to Omics' reputation. [12]

Beall coined the term "predatory meetings" for a new activity of OMICS and others in organising scientific conferences claiming editorial boards and organising committees with prominent academics who have not agreed to participate, with high fees for attendance, and with poor reviewing standards for acceptance. [1] The business model involves "conferences organized by revenue-seeking companies that want to exploit researchers' need to build their vitas with conference presentations and papers in the published proceedings or affiliated journals," and additional profit can be made when these affiliated journals are predatory publishers [3] potentially linked to the conference organisers (as are OMICS and ConferenceSeries, for example). [13] Deceptively similar names to existing reputable conferences are also used, and conference locations are also creating the potential for confusion. For example, in 2013 the OMICS named a conference "Entomology-2013," a name nearly identical to the one used by the Entomological Society of America (ESA) for its annual meeting, Entomology 2013. Similarly, the ESA's annual "International Congress of Entomology" has been mimicked by OMICS with an "International Conference of Entomology." [1] Other groups have used this approach, one example being the once-every-five-years "International Conference on Traffic and Transport Psychology" organised by the Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety – Queensland for Brisbane in August, 2016, was preceded by the predatory World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology (WASET)–organised International Conferences on Traffic and Transport Psychology in Osaka in 2015 and Chicago in 2016. [6]

Beall has criticised the financial arrangements for OMICS conferences, noting that the "registration policy shows that they never grant refunds for registration fees – even if they themselves cancel or postpone the conference. Instead, they grant a credit for other OMICS conferences." [1] If someone registers to attend one of these conferences, and then realises they sought a different conference with the same or a similar name, a refund is not possible. This is partly why Beall recommends, "in the strongest terms possible, that all scholars from all countries avoid doing business in any way with the OMICS Group. Do not submit papers. Do not agree to serve on their editorial boards. Do not register for or attend their conferences." [1]

Prevalence

The number of predatory conferences has increased rapidly, with OMICS alone stating in 2016 that they host about 3,000 conferences per year.[ citation needed ] Christoph Bartneck, an associate professor in information technology at New Zealand's University of Canterbury, was invited to attend a conference, organised under OMICS' ConferenceSeries banner, [13] on atomic and nuclear physics to be held in late 2016. Having little knowledge of this subject as an IT professor, Bartneck used iOS's autocomplete function to write a submission, choosing randomly from its suggestions after starting each sentence using words like "atomic" and "nuclear", [5] and submitted it under the name Iris Pear (a reference to Siri and Apple). [14] The 516-word abstract contained the words "good" and "great" a combined total of 28 times. [14] Despite being obvious nonsense, the work was accepted within three hours of submission and a conference registration fee of US $1,099 requested. [5] [14] Bartneck commented that he was "reasonably certain that this is a money-making conference with little to no commitment to science", a comment he based on the poor "quality of the review process" and the high cost of attendance, [5] and consistent with Beall's criticisms. [1]

Characteristics

Characteristics of predatory meetings which are similar to those attracting criticism in predatory publishing include: Rapid acceptance of submissions with poor quality control and little or no true peer review; [14] acceptance of submissions consisting of nonsense and/or hoaxed content; [5] [14] notification of high attendance fees and charges only after acceptance; [5] claiming involvement of academics in conference organising committees without their agreement, [1] and not allowing them to resign; [4] [15] mimicry of the names or website styles of more established conferences, [6] including holding a similarly named conference in the same city; [1] and promoting meetings with unrelated images lifted from the Internet. [7]

Federal Trade Commission action

On 25 August 2016, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a lawsuit against the OMICS Group, iMedPub, ConferenceSeries, and Srinubabu Gedela (the Indian national who is president of the companies), partly in response to on-going pressure to act against predatory publishers. [16] [9] [17] The complaint, lodged with the United States District Court for the District of Nevada jointly by the FTC and federal prosecutor Daniel Bogden, alleges that the defendants have been "deceiving academics and researchers about the nature of its publications and hiding publication fees ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars." [18] The complaint also covers predatory meetings, noting that "OMICS regularly advertises conferences featuring academic experts who were never scheduled to appear in order to attract registrants" [9] and that attendees "spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on registration fees and travel costs to attend these scientific conferences." [18] Attorneys for the OMICS Group published a response on their website, claiming "your FTC allegations are baseless. Further we understand that FTC working towards favoring some subscription based journals publishers who are earning Billions of dollars from scientists literature [sic]", and suggesting that corporations in the scientific publishing business were behind the allegations. [16]

The court ruled in favor of the FTC in March 2019, and ordered Srinubabu Gedela and his companies to pay $50.1 million in damages. [19]

Further reading

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Federal Trade Commission</span> United States government agency

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is an independent agency of the United States government whose principal mission is the enforcement of civil (non-criminal) antitrust law and the promotion of consumer protection. The FTC shares jurisdiction over federal civil antitrust law enforcement with the Department of Justice Antitrust Division. The agency is headquartered in the Federal Trade Commission Building in Washington, DC.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hindawi (publisher)</span> Scientific and medical journal publisher

Hindawi is a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journals currently active in scientific, technical, and medical (STM) literature. It was founded in 1997 in Cairo, Egypt, and purchased in 2021 for $298 million by John Wiley & Sons, a large US-based publishing company.

Dove Medical Press is an academic publisher of open access peer-reviewed scientific and medical journals, with offices in Macclesfield, London, Princeton, New Jersey, and Auckland. In September 2017, Dove Medical Press was acquired by the Taylor and Francis Group.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniel Bogden</span> American attorney

Daniel G. Bogden is an American attorney who served as United States Attorney for the District of Nevada.

MDPI is a publisher of open-access scientific journals. It publishes over 390 peer-reviewed, open access journals. MDPI is among the largest publishers in the world in terms of journal article output, and is the largest publisher of open access articles.

Pulsus Group is a health informatics and digital marketing company and publisher of scientific, technical, and medical literature. It was formed in 1984, primarily to publish peer-reviewed medical journals. As of 2016, Pulsus published 98 hybrid and full open-access journals, 15 of which had been adopted as the official publications of related medical societies. Pulsus Group also conducts conferences in association with scientific societies.

Allied Academies is a reportedly fraudulent corporation chartered under the laws of North Carolina. Its postal address is in London, United Kingdom. It presents itself as an association of scholars, with supporting and encouraging research and the sharing and exchange of knowledge as its stated aims. The organization consists of 30 affiliate academies, which provide awards to academics and publish academic journals both online and in hard copy for members. Since 2015 the organization has been listed on Jeffrey Beall's list of "potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers". It is in a partnership with OMICS Publishing Group which uses its website and logo. In 2018, OMICS owner Srinubabu Gedela declared that he had informed the Nevada court that Allied Academies was a subsidiary of OMICS International. During a conference in 2018, they falsely listed a prominent chemist among its organizing committee who had not agreed to this and was not affiliated with Allied Academies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bentham Science Publishers</span> Academic publishing company

Bentham Science Publishers is a company that publishes scientific, technical, and medical journals and e-books. It publishes over 120 subscription-based academic journals and around 40 open access journals.

Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP) is a predatory academic publisher of open-access electronic journals, conference proceedings, and scientific anthologies that are considered to be of questionable quality. As of December 2014, it offered 244 English-language open-access journals in the areas of science, technology, business, economy, and medicine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association</span> Industry association in scholarly publishing

The Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) is a non-profit trade association of open access journal and book publishers. Having started with an exclusive focus on open access journals, it has since expanded its activities to include matters pertaining to open access books and open scholarly infrastructure.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OMICS Publishing Group</span> Discredited academic publishing company

OMICS Publishing Group is a predatory publisher of open access academic journals. It started publishing its first journal in 2008. By 2015, it claimed over 700 journals, although about half of them were defunct. Its subsidiaries and brands include Allied Academies, Conference Series LLC LTD, EuroSciCon LTD, Hilaris Publishing, iMedPub LTD, Longdom Publishing SL, Meetings International, Pulsus Group, Research & Reviews, SciTechnol, Trade Science Inc, Life Science Events, Walsh Medical Media, and IT Medical Team.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Predatory publishing</span> Fraudulent business model for scientific publications

Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors while only superficially checking articles for quality and legitimacy, and without providing editorial and publishing services that legitimate academic journals provide, whether open access or not. The rejection rate of predatory journals is low, but seldom zero. The phenomenon of "open access predatory publishers" was first noticed by Jeffrey Beall, when he described "publishers that are ready to publish any article for payment". However, criticisms about the label "predatory" have been raised. A lengthy review of the controversy started by Beall appears in The Journal of Academic Librarianship.

Beall's List was a prominent list of predatory open-access publishers that was maintained by University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall on his blog Scholarly Open Access. The list aimed to document open-access publishers who did not perform real peer review, effectively publishing any article as long as the authors pay the article processing charge. Originally started as a personal endeavor in 2008, Beall's List became a widely followed piece of work by the mid-2010s. The list was used by scientists to identify exploitative publishers and detect publisher spam.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Who's Afraid of Peer Review?</span> Science article by John Bohannon

"Who's Afraid of Peer Review?" is an article written by Science correspondent John Bohannon that describes his investigation of peer review among fee-charging open-access journals. Between January and August 2013, Bohannon submitted fake scientific papers to 304 journals owned by fee-charging open access publishers. The papers, writes Bohannon, "were designed with such grave and obvious scientific flaws that they should have been rejected immediately by editors and peer reviewers", but 60% of the journals accepted them. The article and associated data were published in the 4 October 2013 issue of Science as open access.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeffrey Beall</span> American librarian

Jeffrey Beall is an American librarian and library scientist, who drew attention to "predatory open access publishing", a term he coined, and created Beall's list, a list of potentially predatory open-access publishers. He is a critic of the open access publishing movement and particularly how predatory publishers use the open access concept, and is known for his blog Scholarly Open Access. He has also written on this topic in The Charleston Advisor, in Nature, in Learned Publishing, and elsewhere.

Neuropsychiatry is a quarterly peer-reviewed open access medical journal covering research on neuropsychiatry. The journal was established in 2011 and originally published by Future Medicine with Wayne Goodman and F. Markus Leweke serving as its founding editors-in-chief up to 2015. Under the Future Science imprint, the journal's impact factor ranged from 0.486 to 1.456 (2012-2015). Since 2016 it is published by Pulsus Group via its openaccessjournals.com imprint, which is on Jeffrey Beall's list of "potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers". According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal had a 2016 journal impact factor of 4.778. However, that impact factor was based on a total of 9 "citable items" in 2014, as no articles were deemed "citable" in subsequent years, and in 2018 the journal was omitted from the 2017 Journal Citation Reports.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Future Medicine</span> British academic publisher

Future Medicine is a privately owned company based in London, England, United Kingdom. It is part of Future Science Publishing Group, primarily to publish peer-reviewed medical journals. Future Medicine publishes hybrid and full open access journals.

Jacobs Publishers is a publisher of various international journals based in Hyderabad, India. Jacobs Publishers has been included on Beall's List of predatory open-access publishers and has faced other criticisms of its publishing practices.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gedela Srinubabu</span> Scientist, industrialist

Gedela Srinubabu is the chief executive officer of Pulsus Group. He founded the OMICS Publishing Group publishing group, scientific journal publishing company that publishes science findings online for free.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Beall, Jeffrey; Levine, Richard (25 January 2013). "OMICS Goes from "Predatory Publishing" to "Predatory Meetings"". Scholarly Open Access. Archived from the original on 5 June 2016. Retrieved 22 October 2016.
  2. 1 2 Stone, Teresa Elizabeth; Rossiter, Rachel Cathrine (2015). "Predatory publishing: Take care that you are not caught in the Open Access net". Nursing & Health Sciences. 17 (3): 277–279. doi:10.1111/nhs.12215. PMID   26224548.
  3. 1 2 Beall, Jeffrey (14 July 2015). "Another Taiwan-Based Mega-Scholarly Conference Organizer Emerges". Scholarly Open Access. Archived from the original on 8 November 2016. Retrieved 22 October 2016.
  4. 1 2 Elliott, Carl (5 June 2012). "On Predatory Publishers: a Q&A With Jeffrey Beall". The Chronicle of Higher Education . Retrieved 22 October 2012.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Hunt, Elle (22 October 2016). "Nonsense paper written by iOS autocomplete accepted for conference". The Guardian . Retrieved 22 October 2016.
  6. 1 2 3 Beall, Jeffrey (6 October 2015). "More Duplication of Journal Titles and Conference Names by Predatory Publishers". Scholarly Open Access. Archived from the original on 24 December 2016. Retrieved 22 October 2016.
  7. 1 2 Background Briefing (4 August 2015). "'Bogus' scholarly society agrees to publish papers without peer review". ABC Radio National . Retrieved 22 October 2016.
  8. ↑ "Questionable Conferences - Caltech Library" . Retrieved 25 October 2019.
  9. 1 2 3 Straumsheim, Carl (29 August 2016). "Federal Trade Commission begins to crack down on 'predatory' publishers". Inside Higher Ed . Retrieved 22 October 2016.
  10. ↑ "Court rules against OMICS". 3 April 2019. Retrieved 25 October 2019.
  11. ↑ Aut, Grant Andrew Author (2019). "Academic publisher fined $50 million for deceptive practices". Physics Today. doi:10.1063/PT.6.2.20190410a. S2CID   243254275 . Retrieved 25 October 2019.{{cite journal}}: |first1= has generic name (help)
  12. ↑ "OMICS chief Srinubabu Gedela: 'Our revenue from India is almost zero'". The Indian Express. 2018-07-20. Retrieved 2023-12-17.
  13. 1 2 Beall, Jeffrey (13 October 2016). "Bogus British Company "Accredits" OMICS Conferences". Scholarly Open Access. Archived from the original on 6 November 2016. Retrieved 22 October 2016.
  14. 1 2 3 4 5 Bartneck, Christoph (20 October 2016). "iOS Just Got A Paper On Nuclear Physics Accepted At A Scientific Conference". University of Canterbury Human Interface Technology (HIT) Lab, New Zealand. Retrieved 22 October 2016.
  15. ↑ Kolata, Gina (8 April 2013). "For Scientists, an Exploding World of Pseudo-Academia". The New York Times . Retrieved 22 October 2016.
  16. 1 2 "FTC sues OMICS group: Are predatory publishers' days numbered?". STAT News. 2 September 2016. Retrieved 22 October 2016.
  17. ↑ "Federal Trade Commission v. OMICS Group Inc". 26 August 2016. Retrieved 26 January 2017.
  18. 1 2 Shonka, David C.; Rusu, Ioana; Ashe, Gregory A.; Bogden, Daniel G.; Welsh, Blaine T. (25 August 2016). "Case No. 2:16-cv-02022 – Complaint for Permanent Injunction and Other Equitable Relief" (PDF). Case 2:16-cv-02022. Federal Trade Commission . Retrieved 22 October 2016.
  19. ↑ "Court Rules in FTC's Favor Against Predatory Academic Publisher OMICS Group; Imposes $50.1 Million Judgment against Defendants That Made False Claims and Hid Publishing Fees". Federal Trade Commission. 3 April 2019. Retrieved 13 June 2019.
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