Editorial pubs.acs.org/ac
From the Great to the Scam, Carefully Select Your Scientific Conferences remember attending my first Pittcon while a graduate student; with its 25,000 attendees and the chance to meet some of the leaders in the field, it was exciting and educational. Since then, there are a number of conferences that I look forward to attending. Besides old favorites, attending a small specialty meeting in a new field is exhilarating, especially when exploring novel research directions. Like me, I expect that many of you regularly receive multiple conference invitations every single day, and a percentage of these are new and unfamiliar. Should we attend? Before you decide, it is wise to consider the warning principle, let the buyer beware. There has been a proliferation of questionable (some may even claim predatory) scientific conferences.1 These meetings prey on early career scientists and others who may not realize the need to perform due diligence. There have even been lawsuits against some organizations that have been associated with these fake conferences, among other questionable practices.2 Because people can make money on meetings, it may came as no surprise that dubious meetings are being promoted. While I have questioned the value of attending such meetings, I always assumed they actually took place, but perhaps without all of the speakers and attendees promised. I also thought that if attendance at these meetings was poor, they would slowly fade away. I had not realized that there was an even more insidious conference promotional effort taking place−the scam! These scammers create completely fictitious meetings. The fake conference Web site will list an organizer, the conference location, speakers, schedules, hotels, social programs, and all of the other details one expects from an international meeting. I learned this because of a strange case of academic identity theft directed at me. I am listed as organizing a scam conference: the 15th Eurasia Conference. The conference Web site says the meeting will cover all branches of modern chemistry and goes on to state that previous conferences in this series were organized in Asian and European countries, with this one the first to be organized in America. While I cannot tell if the earlier meetings in this series were real, this one is not. The phony conference brochure available for download was well done and included a made-up welcome message from me, an impressive scientific committee, Nobel Prize winning plenary speakers, CVs of the invited speakers, schedules, hotels, and many other details. However, everything about the meeting is a fraud. The creators/scammers have tried (and hopefully not succeeded) in establishing a line of credit for the conference under my name by creating fake bank accounts and using false identification in my name. This type of fake conference propagates throughout real Web sites, and so the 15th Eurasia Conference has showed up in legitimate conference calendars. My worry, of course, is that individuals will have registered and perhaps even paid for conference housing; they will be out a fair amount of money and may be quite surprised in December when they arrive to a nonexistent event and no hotel reservations.
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© XXXX American Chemical Society
My goal in sharing my story is not to prevent you from attending new meetings on exciting topics. There are plenty of great, genuine conferences to select from. However, given the considerable preparation that goes into promoting these scam conferences, they may be hard to spot. I encourage everyone to perform due diligence before deciding to attend a new meeting. If you have any doubts, contact the organizers using their established, publically available e-mail addresses. Doing so may save you both time and money.
Jonathan V. Sweedler, Editor-in-Chief, Analytical Chemistry
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AUTHOR INFORMATION
ORCID
Jonathan V. Sweedler: 0000-0003-3107-9922 Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
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REFERENCES
(1) Bowman, J. D. Am. J. Pharm. Educ. 2014, 78 (10), 176. (2) Straumsheim, C. Federal Trade Commission begins to crack down on ‘predatory’ publishers. Inside Higher Ed, August 29, 2016, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/08/29/federal-tradecommission-begins-crack-down-predatory-publishers (accessed October 22, 2016).
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DOI: 10.1021/acs.analchem.7b03170 Anal. Chem. XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX
