Academics beware: Scam websites will keep on trying to sucker you
Academics who deal even once with “predatory” publishers of fake science news may join a suckers list that is passed around by scammers, a Citizen experiment has shown.
It’s a surprising development from an experiment that began as a look at shady conferences, organized to fleece junior academics. (Researchers pay fees in the $1,000 range in the hope that attending will help their careers, but the content is worthless.)
To test some conferences, we submitted a ridiculous piece of research claiming that birds live at the bottom of the ocean. Robins, for heaven’s sake. And roadrunners. We sent a second submission about flying pigs, dressed up in science language.
OMICS International of India, organizers of 3,000 conferences a year, told us that sure, we could present both papers, for a fee.
So, point made. OMICS was exposed as an operator of shady conferences, and we thought it would all die down.
But the predatory science industry wasn’t done yet. Suddenly, everybody wants a piece of the action on ocean-bottom birds. It’s evidence that once you deal with a predatory publisher, your name and contact information will be used by others.
Here’s one offer we received after applying to the OMICS conference: “Greetings! “Hope you are doing good. We found your abstract entitled ‘Strategies for remediation of benthic and pelagic species dependent on coral reefs: Cases of T. migratorius and G. californianus’ presented in 2nd International Conference on Bioscience & 5th International Conference on Integrative Biology. We would like to Publish your full length article in our Medical & Clinical Research. If you are interested, I would appreciate receiving your submission on or before 15th July 2017. Kindly send your article to editor@ medclinres.net.”
For clarity, “benthic” and “pelagic” refer to things underwater. T. migratorius is a robin, and G. californianus is the roadrunner. I like roadrunners.
But even if these underwater birds existed, why would a journal called Medical and Clinical Research care? And how did they get my contact information, which was not on the abstract?
Soon another unsolicited invitation arrived, from a different journal but every bit as shady:
“Heartiest greetings from the Journal of Quality in Primary Health Care!!
“We came through your abstract entitled ‘Strategies for remediation of benthic and pelagic species dependent on coral reefs .... ’
“If you are interested, I would like to invite you to contribute the full length paper for publication in our Quality in Primary Health Care.”
And here are two more cases, with a different strategy. One says:
“Dear Dr. Thomas Spears1 (sic),
“If you haven’t replied me kindly have a look on this gentle reminder. I am writing in regard to your work entitled ‘VEGF proliferation in cardiac cells contributes to vascular declension: lessons from the Ruskin experience’, we have contacted you regarding the submission of your work to Journal of Integrative Cardiology...”
A second shady journal also wrote praising the same paper and asking for further submissions.
Just one problem: There’s no such paper. I did submit such an article in 2015 to test whether a website (now closed) was fake or legitimate, and when they accepted the junk submission I didn’t pay up. The submission was never published. So how do these other publishers know about it? Also, why do these two scammers and others like them call me Dr. Spears1?
(The most obvious explanation for the misspelling of my name is that they’re referencing my Twitter username — @TomSpears1 — which only further proves the ineptitude of these predatory publishers, as my Twitter bio clearly states that I’m a reporter ... not a doctor.)
What’s clear is that even my unpublished submissions are getting passed around and around, with the misspelled name included.
The conclusion: If you deal with these scammers once, you paint a target on your back for a long time.