Beware of fake conferences!

Science fraud is on the rise, taking on new forms and covering new areas. First of all, this concerns the publications of the Higher Attestation Commission for the defense of a dissertation. We’ve written about junk magazines in the past, talking about their tricks that inexperienced writers fall for and how they can be avoided. Today we will talk about fake scientific conferences.

Participation in conferences is an integral part of the work of researchers and university professors. At conferences of various levels, from student to prestigious international ones, scientists exchange experience and acquired knowledge. The importance of conferences for the development of science can hardly be overestimated, so participation in them is an important indicator of the scientific activity of a scientist.

For graduate students and applicants, scientific conference is an additional opportunity to publish the results of their research. Conference materials are published in large numbers, published in the public domain and indexed by the RSCI and leading citation databases. And if the conference is international, then the published report of the speech at it can be considered as a VAC publication. This attracts various kinds of scammers who make money by rigging conferences and publishing low-quality, unreviewed collections.

Junk conferences: what are they?

Bad conferences

The first group is conferences that are held by individuals and organizations, and collections of reports do not have a LBC and other attributes of a printed publication. Their absence makes it impossible to index published materials in the RSCI or in another database.

In practice, most often we are talking about a discrepancy between the real status of the conference and that stated in the published announcement of the event.

As a rule, the organizers of such conferences attract the attention of young or inexperienced scientists with loud names that contain the words “international”, “all-Russian”, “XIII annual” and others, and also often use complex phrases, including in foreign languages to give “status” to the event. In fact, “international” can only mean that a scientist from any country can take part in such a conference: after all, the more participants, the higher the profit of the organizer.

Participation in such events will not bring the author the desired publication, nor contacts in the authoritative scientific community, nor new knowledge. The only thing you can get is a feeling of regret for the lost time and money.

Fake conferences

Some of them are simple scams that offer the author to pay a fee for participation and publication. As a rule, by the date of the proposed release of the collection of reports, the organizers “evaporate”: the conference website is down, the phones are not answered.

Some are elaborate, elaborate scams that even seasoned scientists with years of conference attendance can fall for. The organizers of such scams spend a lot of money to buy databases of contacts of scientists, create high-quality websites with a beautiful design, and announce well-known hotels and conference halls as conference venues.

Having reached the site of such a conference through contacts from a letter sent by an international organization to their personal mail, many scientists have no doubts about the authenticity of the event. As a rule, with free participation in the conference itself, the organizers offer the scientist a number of paid additional opportunities: from publishing abstracts in prestigious international journals to participating in a paper competition, the winner of which receives a grant or a “dream job”. The only thing that the organizers ask is to pay a “solid” guarantee fee as confirmation of participation.

A similar scam, known by the name of the site as ICCESS, received a wide response. The defunct Working Group of Climate Change has sent information to scientists and scientific organizations around the world about the International Conference on Clean Energy and Climate Change (ICCESS 2011) in London. To participate in the conference, its organizers promised to provide a grant of 1,500 pounds, but asked to pre-pay for accommodation in a non-existent (but with two high-quality Internet sites) Palace Garden Hotel (450 pounds) through the Western Union payment system. After paying for the accommodation, the organizers informed the scientists that they would send an invitation to apply for a visa, but as a guarantee of participation in the event, they asked to send another 500 pounds through the same payment system. Surprisingly, scammers have been extorting money this way for several years!

7 ways to check if a conference is fake

There are several ways to avoid falling for the tricks of scammers:

1. Find information about the conference on the Internet: possible publications about it, reviews and comments. It is useful to search for information in social networks – this way you can communicate directly with the participants of conferences of previous years, ask them for their opinion on the quality of the event;
2. If the name of the conference is “international”, ask about its foreign participants, if possible, contact the speakers (again, through social networks, by mail – many scientists are open to communication);
3. Make sure that the organizer of the conference is a scientific organization, university, research institute, and not Horns and Hooves LLC. The announcement of the conference should always contain the site of the conference organizer, the list of sponsors, contacts for communication. If in doubt, try writing a letter to the announced sponsors and asking if they are indeed financially supporting this conference.
4. Check the availability of information about the organizing committee of the conference. The composition of the organizing committee speaks about its scientific level and therefore is often published on the event website.
5. Check the existence of the indicated conference venues through the reference systems: booking.com, 101hotels.ru and others. If the hotel exists, send a request to the hotel administrator using the contacts indicated on the site with a request to clarify the dates of the event.
6. Find collections of past events and study the imprint: their absence should alert you;
7. Find out if there is a selection (review) of reports. If the texts of the report are accepted up to the date of the conference, it can hardly be said that the conference materials are being reviewed;

Some representatives of the academic community also propose to classify multidisciplinary topics and correspondence form of their holding as signs of “fake” conferences and, not without reason, call for classifying these conferences as “garbage”. Following the example of “Bill’s list”, or the list of “junk” magazines, lists of fake conferences have already begun to appear.

Participate in good conferences

Participation in scientific conferences is important for every scientist: it is both an opportunity to convey to the scientific community the results of their research, and an opportunity to discuss with specialists the scientific and practical significance of the work being done and publish abstracts of the report outlining their achievements. Choosing a conference should be taken as seriously as choosing a journal to publish your papers. After all, participation in “garbage” conferences will not open up to you the opportunities that participation in an authoritative, significant event for the academic environment gives you. We wish you successful performances and new discoveries!

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