When pigs fly: Fake science conferences spread wings
Academics pay to speak at them to further their careers without doing any research
Here’s the latest way to cheat your way to success in the academic world: Give a speech at a science conference that’s so awful, it will let you present research about flying pigs. All you have to do is pay cash. Companies that host thousands of these conferences per year are now offering them in Canada, and one operator is using former Canadian companies as a front.
Fake, but expensive, conferences help people to become professors, doctors and other professionals without proper training by providing credentials they haven’t really earned. They are marketed heavily in the Third World.
And far from being a victimless fraud, this cheats the taxpayer and spreads misinformation and incompetence in important professions.
This form of research fraud is simple. It goes like this:
When a scientist discovers something big, he or she publishes the findings in a science journal.
But organizations known as “predatory” journals will publish fake studies and make them look like real science. They help unqualified people to get university jobs or promotions by making it appear they published legitimate discoveries. The journal collects a steep fee.
Last fall, the Citizen exposed an Indian company called OMICS International for publishing fabricated papers and making them look legitimate. OMICS expanded into Canada last year, taking over two Canadian publishing houses. But it turns out there’s more. OMICS and others also run conferences that accept outrageously fraudulent work, the Citizen has now found. People who pay to participate in them can establish professional credentials without doing any real research work. They tell their own universities how they have been invited to present their important findings to a highlevel symposium.
The university (and ultimately the taxpayer) pays for travel to conferences in Paris, Dubai, Las Vegas and other tourist spots. Participants don’t even have to show up at the conference, because they have written proof that they were registered there.
The events do actually take place, but they are widely criticized for being of low quality.
The Citizen took a look at the OMICS conferences. They claim to be “peer-reviewed,” which means that independent experts check the quality of what speakers are going to present. But the reality is that they, like the journals, accept garbage for a fee.
We tested an OMICS biology conference scheduled for this summer, submitting two awful proposals dressed up in pseudoscientific language:
Paper No. 1: The biomechanics of how pigs fly. Biomechanics is the study of bones, muscles and other parts that help animals move. But a paper on the feathers, hocks, and spare ribs of flying pigs? It’s a long shot at best.
And the author’s name might well have been a red flag: Dr. Kalmi Ishmail. (Say it aloud.)
Still, OMICS invited us to the conference to lecture on flying pigs — as long we first paid them US$999.
We threw in a backup paper, to make sure the first one wasn’t just a slip. It claims that birds live at the bottom of the ocean, including robins and, just for fun, roadrunners. Our paper said robins are endangered by overfishing, and underwater roadrunners are too slow to escape their “wily predators.” We acknowledged funding from the Acme Company, which supplied the rockets and explosives in the old Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons.
OMICS accepted us again. It said both our submissions passed peer review.
The Citizen’s two papers accepted for the OMICS biosciences conference are:
“Evolution of flight characteristics in avian-porcine physiology” and “Strategies for remediation of benthic and pelagic species dependent on coral reefs: Cases of T. migratorius and G. californianus.” Porcine means related to pigs. Benthic and pelagic species live underwater. The Latin words are the scientific names of robins and roadrunners.
At the University of Saskatchewan, medical professor Roger Pierson served for years on the committee that decides on tenure and promotion for faculty. “Being an invited speaker is a big deal” for anyone on a career track, he said.
“That is something that departments, colleges and universities all use to evaluate your reputation.”
Yet he said universities often can’t tell which conferences are real.
“The university, and people who support the university, get hurt by it (fraud) because those are the people paying the bills,” he said.
“If someone gets tenure in Canada, that is not a trivial exercise. You’re talking 20 to 30 years, plus,” of career.
“Universities should care about this. These are our colleagues. And if they attain credibility by fraud, it affects all of us.”
OMICS and companies like it — a prominent one is called WASET, from Turkey — each offer thousands of such conferences a year in Rome, Venice, Mumbai, Bangkok, New York and around the world. They reach this total by inviting researchers from 30 separate disciplines to one hotel at the same time, and running separate sessions in different meeting rooms. Each one becomes a “conference.” They repeat this a dozen or more times a month.
Some OMICS and WASET conferences are in Canada — this year each company lists one in Toronto and one in Vancouver, each covering such a wide range of scientific areas that they are nearly useless to anyone who wants to learn the latest in a focused field. WASET is also coming to Montreal.
OMICS also runs 700 science journals worldwide. It and WASET are among more than 1,000 “predatory” publishers identified by Jeffrey Beall of the University of Colorado.