This is at my real-world email address, under the name I publish my papers. I can only think that some nefarious hucksters are trawling scientific journals and harvesting contact details from the author lists. Either that, or a legitimate organization I've signed up to has shared their mailing list; but a robot seems more likely.
Whatever's going on, it's getting worse, at least for me. A few months ago, I got maybe one piece of sci-spam a week, which was tolerable. Now it's up to half a dozen or more per week and getting ridiculous. Here's what I've got just in the past 10 days.
Lab Products
These I can kind of see the point of: if you have a product to sell, you want to advertise it to people who might want to buy it. The problem is that as someone who scans brains, and last touched a pipette about 8 years ago, I really don't want to buy:
Two readouts for the price of one - Calcium and Arrestin. Select Any Gq-Coupled Calcium Cell Line and Save! Special Fall Savings!Nor am I interested in:
Dear Colleague, Through your publications, we have noted that our Catalase antibody (GTX110704) may be useful to your current work. Catalase is a peroxisomal enzyme that converts hydrogen peroxide to oxygen and water, making it a key feature of the cell’s defense against oxidative stress...To be honest, if you need to be told what catalase is, you're unlikely to want to buy a product that will let you measure it... but that's just my opinion, and I'm not a spammer.
Conferences
This is where it gets weird. Spam inviting people to conferences, doesn't make sense, because by definition, if a conference is resorting to spam to get attendees, it's not very good. Respected conferences are often oversubscribed; the whole point about a conference is that people want to be there, because other interesting people are expected to be there. Reputation is everything.
Here's a few I've been offered in the past two weeks:
31 October 2012 is the deadline to save on registration for APAL 2012. Covering current and specialty aspects of mental health, this is one gathering that you cannot afford to miss! ... Please note that payment can be made by credit card.and...
1st International Conference on Cultural Psychiatry in Mediterranean Countries, Tel Aviv, Israel | 5-7 November, 2012 The countdown has begun: Less than 2 months to WPA-TPS in Tel Aviv.and...
Dear colleague, I welcome you to our first international conference on the topic of Integrated psychiatry and clinical psychology as our valued guest speaker. Because of your publication profile, we invite you to present ideas related to your works on related to the topic of the conference. Psychiatry and clinical psychology branches have evolved rapidly in past couple of decades. So much so that several sub-branches have emerged as parts of these sciences. The theme of present conference is integrated psychiatry and clinical psychology...Journals
If you are resorting to spam to get to people to write for your journal, I don't ever want to read it and will never cite anything published in it.
Even if you were only angling for readers, I'd be suspicious of your integrity, but to spam for people to submit to you is absurd. Even mediocre journals nowadays get far more submissions than they can ever print. So if your journal isn't even mediocre enough to attract people then you have a real problem.
Oh, and you also have a problem if you can't spell your own journal title nor write coherent English despite claiming to only accept high quality scientific papers in that language.Journal of Anesthesiology and Clinical Science (ISSN 2049-9752)Journal of Anesthesialogy [sic] & Clinical Science is an Open Access and peer reviewed Journal which aims to publish top quality papers on administration of anaesthesia during surgeries and pain management etc. The Journal has well [sic] established Editorial Board and follows rigorous peer review for all the [sic] manuscript's [sic]. visit [sic] the Journal to find latest [sic] articles published... We invite you to submit your research work/paper for the Anesthesialogy and Clinical Science Journal...
Has anyone else noticed a surge of this kind of thing recently?
25 comments:
I have, though conference spam* seems to be ubiquitous. Barely a days seem to go by without yet another invitation to attend some utterly irrelevant conference about something I've never even heard of.
It got worse for me after (a) joining twitter; (b) writing pieces in the press
*My favourite science spam message, which I think I saved somewhere, is an email mentioning one of my published papers before trying to sell me an industrial septic tank. Either their marketing is way off or mine is.
I have been getting this for years. I didn't notice any significant change recently. Somehow these people must get to your email address, either through publications or through your departmental website perhaps. My spam filters do a good job removing a large part of this but there is still considerable amount that gets through. All these fake conferences and journals...
I find it is definitely getting worse - I am receiving scores of these a week, invitation to edit e-books, speak at conference (both paid by myself rather than being paid for), attend weird conferences etc. Are you going to the Society for Neuroscience Meeting? I am going for the first time in ages and have the vague notion that the spam might be correlated to that (although it has been bad for some time)
I spoke at a couple of neuroscience conferences about 6 years ago when I was a neuroscience student and they (and others) are STILL EMAILING ME every year. Also I published a couple of things back then too, so I think some of the journal spam I still get is related to that.
So, yeah. They'll hold onto you like a Rottweiler. I'm not even a scientist anymore and I still get the spam.
I get several invitations a week to contribute to math journals I've never heard of, despite the fact that I am not a professional mathematician, but rather a translator of mathematics. They amuse me since those are the only emails I get which address me as "Dr." But it does seem like I'm getting more and more of them.
I get lots of product spam, but that is undoubtedly because I used to let anyone with free candy or pipette-shaped pens scan my badge at sfn. My favorite recent email reads "buy $500.00 of reagents and get a free t-shirt." I got this exact offer at least 3 times.
Actually, I am pretty sure my spam headache started after a conference. The people at the conference spread the emails to the companies advertising there, and one of them leaked my email. For me the main issue after the standard unethical behavior or every person down the chain to me actually getting spam, is that spam blockers don't seem to recognize this stuff as spam, and it may be very difficult to due to the almost relevance of those texts (and I don't think those texts are specifically meant to be advertisement for those things, but rather a trap to other things once you click on the link).
"I have been getting this for years. I didn't notice any significant change recently. Somehow these people must get to your email address, either through publications or through your departmental website perhaps. My spam filters do a good job removing a large part of this but there is still considerable amount that gets through. All these fake conferences and journals..."
Oh yeah, departmental websites could be it too.
The whole business just strikes me as fundamentally weird and unlikely to work.
Spam selling dodgy penis enlargement pills and pirate Viagra, sure; they're inherently dodgy products. But science is all about reputation, trust, etc. and once you resort to spam, you lose all that. In my book anyway.
Yes, it's unlikely that this spam will be very effective. But to my understanding most spam isn't really effective in promoting the products they advertise. They are more likely a means to deliver nefarious payloads (virus, trojans, etc) or to lure you to their websites etc. I am not sure how likely this is for the kind of crap you receive in science spam - I've never bothered to follow the links and it is probably generally a good idea not to follow links from people you don't know or trust. But still, it's perhaps less likely that they are trying to get you infected with malware. It is perhaps more for simply exposing you to other advertising etc.
While I personally didn't notice that the problem intensified in recent months, I think it does probably relate to publications. Some of these spam emails in fact reference some of my papers (although some of them get those wrong too ;-). It's probably primarily robots trawling the web for your papers.
As I'm only a few years into my 'career', I figured the increased amount of science spam was just due to me getting more publications out. I always assumed that new and obscure journals were designed to make money on the basis of the "open-access" publication fees.
Has anyone ever gone to one of those "fake" conferences and reported what they found? I'd like to see if the conferences actually exist and find out why any serious scientist would attend.
Open-access should flourish with open markets. Those articles are available for scrutiny by anyone, that makes it accountable irrespective of where it came from. Reputable journals matter to researchers for their reputation, whereas freely available articles take precedence in the market place. Why should certain publishers monopolize academic publishing? Open access is the people's voice.
NS, hire a publicity agent or train a P.A. to go through your generic emails and forward the relevant ones. Spam comes in every field.
Matt,
My understanding is they are just that, fake. That people show up in the city, looking for the conference, and the locals have no idea what they were talking about. There are many stories exposing the frauds, and I think not to long ago there were a few reports by people who went to investigate (expecting fraud, but unsure how far the fraud went). My understanding is that you show up in a city and the locals have no idea what you are talking about. The most basic idea is for you to give them a bunch of info, and perhaps pay for registration, room, board, speaking fee, etc.
Why would you go? Because you don't realize it is fake, and you think it is a good opportunity to network. I.e., you are young, inexperienced, and don't have proper mentors to warn you.
I am a botanist and have also seen a significant rise in spam after participating in one particular conference. The classification into product, journal and conference spam seems apt but one could add requests to peer-review submissions to these exploitative open access journals as a fourth category. I sometimes get these requests, together with abstracts that are so hilariously bad that no serious editor would ever send them out for review in the first place.
And that brings me to my disagreement with the above comments. I think these journals are a match made in heaven with the scores of badly trained and inept "scientists" being churned out by fourth rate universities concentrated, I am sorry to say, apparently in India and Brazil but also evident in all other places. They don't know how to test a hypothesis or write a manuscript to save their life but want entries in their publication list. Up come journals that simulate a fake peer review to appear serious but ultimately accept any garbage as long as you fork over the publication fee, and both sides are happy. So I strongly doubt that these journals are just vehicles for advertising or distributing malware; I think what I described may be a sound business model.
I never pay to attend a conference I just rock up like I would to a pub. That goes with any conference, business (like you'd pay thousands), political, academic, religious.. science ones aren't as interesting skip it. If it's nearby and you have the time then just rock up, have a peek around, stay if there's food. Even ones abroad I just rock up in a suit and sign up on the day pay nothing they don't want to be rude and ask you to leave. Purpose of conferences is to bring interested people together. Some of the suss ones might be in a room with a few weirdos but those ones make up for it with home cooked food and not the catering contaminated finger food in larger conferences. Although I like that too. Smaller ones are endearing.
Alex, irrespective of what's published you pick out the gems. I don't see much difference between an article from a fourth rate university academic and a reputable professor from a well know institution. Ok, the latter writes English better and seem more aware of what's going in their field but it's rarely novel. The former might happen to be a slop but the chances of extracting out gems outside the box like you would when looking for gems in a dirt creek is probably more rewarding than watching a polished gem in a shop. If you have a soul that is.
omg,
Conferences are expensive to organize, and our scientific societies are usually not swimming in money. Maybe you should rethink your parasitic behaviour. Then again, if you consider scientific conferences boring anyway, I guess I should not need to worry...
In fact your second comments shows that either I have poorly explained what I mean or you have no idea of the practice of science. In my area at least, nothing gets published in a new journal that is not at that time seen as novel, small as the advance may be in some cases. What I am talking about with regard to ineptness are colleagues who do not understand how to produce knowledge, test their ideas, or even write a coherent sentence.
Oops, "good journal" instead of "new journal".
Conferences are paid for by sponsors. This isn't a fundraiser dinner party or a ticket to the opera. Self sustainable organizations do not rely on conference registration for cash flows. If these organizations don't know how to butter up sponsors then LEARN how to butter up sponsors before ripping off poor scientists. I have NEVER and will NEVER pay to attend a conference. If you're talking about BBQ conferences, alittle bonding session with your Ivy League colleagues showing off posters you did in school, you're right to say I'd pay NOT to have pretentious snobs sniffing my ass.
I'll take my chances with the Brazilian get together in that instance.
omg,
Okay, you really have no clue what you are talking about. Pro tip: not every science is about medicine or materials science and attracts a lot of coporate sponsorship.
The last conference I went to had sponsors, yes, but much of it is paid from attendance fees and membership fees to the society whose annual, well, conference it was. It was actually discussed during the general meeting whether we would need to raise membership fees because the next conference will likely be very expensive, and we would like to keep the attendance fees affordable for students.
Thanks for all the comments. I'd love to go investigate one of these "con"-ferences but they never seem to be in the UK. Strangely they are always in hot countries where you might want to go on holiday... a lot like real conferences.
Alex, you study flowers, there's just no debate here. Conferences that rely on registration fees are not sustainable long term. You need to take the effort and write to thousands of potential sponsors from gardening to rotary clubs, discuss that in your next general meeting. You can hire a publicity agent to reach out to sponsors.
I guet invited to all sorts of conferences not remotely related to my field, like "Advances in Food Hygiene", or "Building Better Non Conductive Materials", most of them being in China or somewhere else in Asia.
I also get all sorts of unsolicited newsletters, from which I cannot unsubscribe.
I thought all these "conferences" were run from a room over a chip shop?
It's not just in your field. IT too. Here's how some rather witty guts responded to the spam: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/05/hakin9_silliness/
I reckon NS should host a conference. Everyone wears masks and hoods. Bilderberg style minus the orgies. Legit email from NS, anonymous address like some run down warehouse, share crackers, dips, auction NS memorabilia like his underwear signed, pledge to ruin some rogue researcher or rally support for some great research cause. No RSVP you rock up or you don't.
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