Keeping your eye open: why you should attend an international conference, not to forget to tell your colleague or supervisor if you are going to attend an eye-health conference

Conferences that aim to get money from researchers have little or nothing in the way of academic return. There are insufficient spaces for speakers at well- established conferences and predatory conferences exploit the need for early career researchers to attend international conferences. Unscrupulous companies are stepping into this gap.

Imagine being invited to present at the London eye-health conference. The other delegates are specialists in different disciplines, such as dentistry, pharmacology, and midwifery. Many of your fellow attendees who have travelled around the globe are expecting to attend conferences in their specific fields. But it’s not clear which conference is being held, why some sessions have been cancelled and why no conference organizers are present. An awareness slowly dawns: everyone has been duped.

Sometimes a check with a senior colleague or mentor can be useful. Diane Negra is a film studies and screen culture researcher at University College Dublin who co-chairs the InterAcademy Partnership, an international network of more than 140 science academies. Mentors and supervisors should advise their early-career colleagues on which conferences are worth attending.

The need for thorough peer review and links to trusted organizations are some of the good conference practices that research communities should be more alert to.

Conferences that are not about science: How to spot a predatory conference, and what science needs to do about them: a guide

There are many scientists who receive invites to present their work at conferences that are not focused on their field. For example, a plant geneticist at India’s National Rice Research Institute in Cuttack, named Molla, gets invites to present his work at conferences that are completely unrelated to his

Is the venue listed? If so, contact the venue to ensure that the event is taking place. If not, ask the organizers for clarification, and be suspicious of poor communication.

• Look out for a lack of contact details for conference organizers, or contacts who are available only through a chatbot, messaging app or unofficial-looking e-mail addresses.

Beall took down his list of predatory journals and publishers under pressure, and thinks lists of high-quality conferences could be helpful. There is a conference evaluation called Think. Check. Attend.’, run by Knowledge E, a research consultancy based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, assists researchers in assessing conference quality.

If the conference proceedings exist, they could give a sense of the event’s academic quality. ResearchGate and other online discussion forums are another way to pool information about conferences.

Source: How to spot a predatory conference, and what science needs to do about them: a guide

“Fake” conference in South Korea that was not intended to be advertised on a conference website for the European Society of Medicine Congress”

Dikoma Shungu accepted an invite to present a paper at the November 2021 European Society of Medicine Congress in Vienna after he received an invitation to do so. But later, after he clicked on a link to the website, it was flagged as suspicious by his university’s information-technology team. He was a featured speaker and a photo of him was used on the event website without his permission. Shungu asked the conference organizers a number of questions, but received no response. He says that he decided it was a fake conference after that. So he asked his credit-card company to refund the conference fee.

The representative says that the company no longer runs events and has put an immense amount of effort into the planning of the November 2021 event. In the three months before the event, we reached out to each speaker to confirm they were going to come, and to remove anyone who didn’t confirm. The keynote section was not included in this process. Overall, the event went quite well considering that it was our society’s first event of that size, and took place during a pandemic.” The spokesperson says that the COVID-19 pandemic helped to explain low attendance numbers at the Berlin conference.

This wasn’t the end of the story, however. Shungu says that he was a featured speaker for the next General Assembly and that his presentation was used without his consent.

Several researchers contacted as part of this investigation criticized ESMED for sending insistent e-mails inviting speakers to conference sessions that they were unqualified to speak at or that did not actually take place. The keynote speaker at the Vienna event was dead.

A representative says that if the conference is accurate and truthful in its communications, it isn’t predatory. If any of our past clients are dissatisfied with the service they received, they can contact us using the contact form on our website and we will make it right.

James McCrostie, a business administration researcher at Daito Bunka University in Tokyo, says that simply internet searching the conference company’s name can reveal its track record.

In 2019, South Korea’s education ministry introduced a requirement for the country’s universities to vet academics’ overseas conference travel. The decision came after a report revealed that 574 professors at 90 universities had participated in conferences that it called “weak”.

The information platform Scholarly Ecosystem Against Fake Publishing Environment, administered by the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI), is one initiative that might help. SAFE, as a public service, monitors suspected insolvent academic journals and predatory academic events around the world. The SAFE map tracks the numbers and locations of conferences organized from 2015 onward by OMICS and the World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology (WASET), another company that is often described as predatory.

The suggestion that its events are weak or suspect is rejected by Wates. The organization has a thorough review process for papers and conference talks, and maintains an open-access database of its proceedings. OMICS was also contacted about its inclusion on SAFE’s watchlist, but had not replied by the time this article went to press.

Stop Predatory Practices, an initiative that is similar to SAFE, was developed by the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. According to Tereza mov, an open-science advocate at OpenAIRE, a non-profit organization based in Athens, roughly 300 people have completed the module on predatory practices.