Anonymity is not a good thing for journals and conferences, especially not when it comes to the organizations backing the journal and the journal “editorial board”.
We have described spamming journals and spamming conferences. Conferences that have found you and want you to come to their conference. Or to quote “Andy Warhol” from JPmonfort: “You are receiving this communication because you have been identified as an Expert in you area of activity. You Are Invited To Join Us in Stockholm!”
Or his colleagues: JOHN.LENNON@expertdreamers.us, leonardo.da.vinci@expertdreamers.us, jules.verne@expertdreamers.us and so on.
Few are as transparent as Jaime Pozuelo-Monfort, that probably wants me to buy his book “The Monfort Plan”. This kind of spam can more or less drive us insane:
“This guy won’t stop, he is the energizer bunny of spam. I have requested him to stop sending me his mindless drivel. I block his e-mails but he just changes names and domains. He has my university e-mail, and he has my consulting e-mail. Mr. Monfort, please stop.”
It is worse when predatory journals like OMICS earlier mentioned in the post Bluff conferences buy journals that are published in Pubmed. Making it harder for us to distinguish the predatory journals and conferences. They can also say that researchers are part of their editorial board. Researchers that don’t necessarily know that this journal even exists.
Another example is: “Journal of International Scientific Publications: Language, Individual & Society”. That have sent out conference invitations. So how can we say that this is a predatory journal? We can start with the fact that they spam invitations through email. But let’s check if there is any validity connected to the journal anyway.
I start by finding information about the journal in Ulrishweb. We can see that the journal is connected to an organization called “Info Invest Ltd” we should of course look this up. I also find a link towards the journal webpage. When it comes to the bibliographic databases that index the journal we find three sources all connected to Ebsco but does not seem to have any visable indexes. When it comes to the company Invest Ltd I have some problems finding an official website. When I try to look for the editorial board on the journal webpage I also find nothing.
I will stop here. It takes a lot of time to thoroughly evaluate all the spamming conferences and journals that send emails. Do we want to receive journal and conference tips this way? Is it maintainable to use time to look up every conference or journal that send us spam like advertisement and see whether we find one that is actually legitimate. Or is this time better spent looking for conferences and journals that have high or good enough quality. And simply ignore all the spamming emails? Well the risk is that we miss something intresting.
Anyway if you are suspicious of an invitation to publish or to take part in an conference, contact me or one of my colleagues so we can discuss the invitation together.
//Thomas