Pseudo-acadmia is something you meet every time your receive an invitation to submit an article in a special number or a normal number but the sender happens to be someone who is representing one of the thousands of predatory publishers. These invitations might even come from those arranging conferences because many of the predatory publishers arrange conferences. The number of these journals, publishers and conferences increases all the time because the way research is published today. Since open access (making research results freely available online) is a requirement from many and those after easy money have noticed it is little work and low start-up barrier to create a journal or two.
Pseudo-academia is a parallel world with its “high ranking” journals and conferences and many of these have names which are close to the original journal and conference, e.g. Entomology-2013 and Entomology 2013, the difference being the hyphen. One of the is the good kind the other is there just to get the money. This play with names means that you have to be very careful which conferences you want to attend and present a paper at or send an article to.
These mails are a close relative to the phising-mails where the sender appears to be your bank or the Univerisity’s IT-department. You do not want to send an article to a journal which is predatory because you will not get the exposure for your research results you are looking for and you might even damage you reputation as a researcher.
Read Scientific Articles Accepted (Personal Check, Too) published by The New York Times where many questions about these operators are asked and some are answered.
Contact the library when you are uncertain of an invitation! You shouldn’t throw out all invitations, some of them come from real publishers and organizers.
Pieta Eklund