The World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology or WASET is a predatory publisher of open accessacademic journals. The publisher has been listed as a "potential, possible, or probable" predatory publisher by American library scientist Jeffrey Beall[1] and is listed as such by the Max Planck Society.[2] WASET's estimated annual revenue in 2017 alone was over $4 million,[3][4] with other estimates ranging from $8.9 million to $11.9 million for the years 2014 to 2019 combined.[5]
WASET has been accused of arranging predatory conferences, in order to artificially boost the academic credentials of presenters and paper submitters.[6][7] It claims to organize several thousands of scientific conferences a year, using names that are the same or similar to real conferences organized by established scientific groups.[8][9] WASET also appears to operate the website "Conference Index", which claims to be a database of international conferences but only lists events from WASET.[10]
Legitimate conferences have publicly warned of identically named, fake WASET conferences.[11][12] In 2015, the University of Toronto released a "scam advisory" about a purported conference on their premises advertised by WASET.[13][14] In 2018 WASET advertised 49,844 conferences, many of which share similar names.[15] Hundreds of conferences may be scheduled for the same location on the same day.[16][17] For example, 116 simultaneous scientific meetings were scheduled in a hotel in Rio de Janeiro in February 2016.[18][19]
The conferences are low-quality, described in one case as a "Potemkin village"[20] and anyone can present a paper by simply paying the registration fee.[21] Conferences are planned many years in advance.[19] The website includes a section on "Featured Locations" featuring photos of popular tourist destinations.[22] Names of researchers have been included as conference committee members, without their knowledge or consent.[18][23]
Organization
WASET is based in Turkey and is registered in Azerbaijan.[24] Its domain name was registered 2007 with a contact address in Dubai.[25] It is run by Cemal Ardil, a former science teacher, with assistance from his daughter Ebru and his son Bora.[4] Cemal Ardil is also the person who has published the most articles on the WASET website.[26][27] Before taking on the name WASET, the organization was known under the name of "Enformatika".[26][27][28][29]
Journal indexing
Journals are indexed in WASET's "International Science Index", not to be confused with the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) index, i.e. the Web of Science.[16] WASET journals were indexed by Scopus and listed in the SCImago Journal Rank from 2009 until 2011, when the coverage was cancelled.[30] They were furthermore included in Qualis, an official Brazilian system for classifying scientific literature, which guides researchers in choosing journals for publication. This inclusion was called a "serious failure" by scientists interviewed by Folha de S.Paulo, a Brazilian daily newspaper.[18]
Media attention
In 2013 one of WASET's journals, the International Journal of Medical, Pharmaceutical, Biological, and Life Sciences, accepted an obviously fake article in a sting operation by John Bohannon. The resulting article and data were published in Science.[31]
In mid-July 2018, a research team of journalists including Süddeutsche Zeitung, ARD, ORF, BR, Falter and Le Monde published articles on unscientific and predatory publishers, including WASET and OMICS.[32][33][34] The group of journalists presented their findings at the 2018 DEF CON 26 conference in a talk entitled "Inside the Fake Science Factory".[35][36][3] They detail how a WASET conference works, show how they gave a presentation on a ludicrous paper (generated using SCIgen[37]) to the gathered academics, and how they confronted the single person organizing the conference. The journalists state that their "findings highlight the prevalence of the pseudo-academic conferences, journals and publications and the damage they can and are doing to society".[35]
↑ "Beware of fake conferences". 26th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN). 2016-11-11. Archived from the original on 2017-07-04. Retrieved 2017-07-04.
↑ "ICP12 2016 in Utrecht!". 12th International Conference on Paleoceanography (ICP12). 2015. Archived from the original on 2016-09-14. Retrieved 2017-07-04.
1 2 Weber-Wulff, Debora (2012-06-17). "Turkish mock conferences". Copy, Shake, and Paste: A blog about plagiarism and scientific misconduct. Archived from the original on 2022-02-12. Retrieved 2022-02-12.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
