Bogus Academic Conferences Lure Scientists
The Wisdom of Admiral Ackbar Because fake scientific journals weren't gnarly enough. If you build it, they will come. And someone, somewhere, is going to try to scam some money out of it. The "it" in this case is open-access journal publishing. Open-access means that anyone can read them without having to navigate a paywall. Part of the deal here is that authors also pay to publish the paper, in a bid to offset the editorial costs of running a well-organized peer-reviewed journal. Seeing the success of legitimate open-access journals such as those published by the Public Library of Science gave some unscrupulous people ideas: why not start up a company and solicit submissions to journals that never publish the articles, or never peer-review the submitted articles, or even one that might peer-review, but charges way more money than what one might pay at another journal? Research librarian Jeffrey Beall has...