Here are five ways to deal with perverse conferences

Conference planning for early career researchers: the role of a senior colleague, mentor, and mentor in the advocacy of good conferences in the eye-health sector

Second, supervisors and established researchers must advise their early-career colleagues about which conferences are genuinely useful. Early career researchers are often the target of flattering offers to give keynote speeches by organizers of predatory events. People who are invited to speak need to be extra careful over predatory proposals. Senior researchers should flag suspicious conference invitations to junior group members and encourage them to ask about invitations they receive.

Imagine being invited to give a presentation at an eye-health conference. The other delegates are specialists in different disciplines, such as dentistry, pharmacology, and midwifery. Everyone from around the world who’s attended your conference is looking forward to attending a conference in their field. But it’s not clear which conference is being held, why some sessions have been cancelled and why no conference organizers are present. Everyone has been deceived.

A senior colleague or mentor can be a useful person to check with. 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.

Third, research communities should more frequently promote good conference practices, such as the need for thorough peer review, and provide links to trusted organizations.

Why to spot a predatory conference, and what science needs to do about them: a guide from Molla’s advice to look for new opportunities

It is a common occurrence for scientists like Molla to receive invitations to present papers at conferences that are unrelated to their field.

If the venue is listed, you should check it out. If so, contact the venue to ensure that the event is taking place. If you don’t know if it is, ask the organizers for clarification and be suspicious of poor communication.

Look for no contact details for conference organizers, or contacts who are only available through messaging apps or unofficial e-mail addresses.

Beall took down his list of predatory journals and publishers in order to preserve the integrity of the journal industry, and he thinks that lists of high-quality conferences in each discipline could be helpful. A list of things to think about during a conference. Check. Knowledge E, based in the U.A., was founded to assist researchers in assessing conference quality.

The quality of the academic content of previous conference proceedings could be passed on to early-career researchers. 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

The ESMED Congress in London, February 2021: Report of a Norwegian researcher who had been invited to speak at a conference without his permission

In April 2021, Dikoma Shungu, a radiology researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, received an invitation to present a paper at the November 2021 European Society of Medicine (ESMED) Congress in Vienna, which he accepted. But later, after he clicked on a link to the website, it was flagged as suspicious by his university’s information-technology team. A photo of him had been used on the event website without permission, and he had been promoted as a featured speaker. Shungu had tried to contact the conference organizers, but received no response. It was then that he realized it was a fake conference. He requested that his credit-card company return the conference fee.

An ESMED representative says that the company no longer runs events and “put an immense amount of effort into planning our November 2021 event, and received positive feedback from several participants. Three months prior to the event we contacted each speaker to confirm they are still planning to come, and deleted from our programme anyone who didn’t confirm. Unfortunately, the keynote section of the programme was overlooked during this process. The event went well despite being the first large event of that size in our society. The low attendance numbers at the Berlin conference can be explained by the COVID-19 vaccine.

This wasn’t the end of the story, however. Shungu says that ESMED continued to use his presentation abstract and photo and list him as a featured speaker for the following year’s General Assembly, without his consent.

Some researchers were contacted by the investigation and said that the e-mails that were sent to speakers inviting them to speak at conference sessions that they didn’t actually take place. The Vienna event even featured a keynote speaker who was deceased.

A conference that is accurate in its communications is not predatory according to a representative. If any one of our past clients is displeased with the service they received, they may contact us using the contact form or email on our website, and we promise to make it right.

James McCrostie, a business-administration researcher at Daito Bunka University in Tokyo, says that simply googling the conference company’s name often reveals its track record (or lack of it).

South Korea’s education ministry requires 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”.

TheSAFE information platform was administered by the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information and is located in Daejeon. SAFE is a public service that watches suspected insolvent academic journals and predatory academic events around the world. The map shows the locations of conferences organized by the World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology (WASET), a company often described as predatory.

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

The Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague came up with the idea of Stop Predatory Practices. A teaching module on predatory practices is one of the modules that has been completed so far by roughly 300 people.