How to identify Predatory Conferences

Source: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-04/scientists-duped-fake-academic-conferences
& http://tinyurl.com/glhceng

Wasting your hard-earned money to publish in predatory (fake) journals could be painful and annoying and so is registering to participate in predatory conferences. Sharing his experiences, James McCrostie, an associate professor at Daito Bunka University in Japan, teaching English as a foreign language, narrated this post made on Times Higher Education site.

He said: "Invitations to what University of Colorado Librarian Jeffrey Beal calls 'predatory conferences' now compete for attention in academics' spam folders with solicitations from dubious open access journals, of which Beall keeps a well-known blacklist".
 
James McCrostie noted that 'all predatory conference organisers share some of the following characteristics':

1). They hide their for-profit nature.
2). They charge high fees and fail to carry out rigorous peer review of conference papers. 3). They fail to carry out rigorous peer review of conference papers.
3). They treat the "call for papers" deadline as flexible.
4). They include ''international'' knowing that many researchers need to attend international conferences for funding and publication purposes.
5). Organisations holding many conferences in very different fields together at the same time, etc.
6). These same predatory publishers spam the email inboxes of scientists -- frequently using the names of more-prominent colleagues without consent -- and then charge these dupes a fee for the privilege of speaking at a conference.

Martha Harbison wrote on her blog: 'The key to falling for a hustle is that age-old piece of advice that so many people choose to ignore: if something seems too good to be true, it probably isn't'.

To read the full article, visit: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/comment/warning-conmen-and-shameless-scholars-operate-area