From The New York Times:
The caller ID on my office telephone said the number was from Las Vegas, but when I picked up the receiver I heard what sounded like a busy overseas call center in the background. The operator, “John,” asked if I would be interested in attending the 15th World Cardiology and Angiology Conference in Philadelphia next month.
“Do I have to be a doctor?” I said, because I’m not one. I got the call because 20 minutes earlier I had entered my phone number into a website run by a Hyderabad, India, company called OMICS International.
“You can have the student rate,” the man replied. With a 20 percent discount, it would be $599. The conference was in just a few weeks, I pointed out — would that be enough time for the academic paper I would be submitting to be properly reviewed? (Again, I know nothing about cardiology.) It would be approved on an “expedited basis” within 24 hours, he replied, and he asked which credit card I would like to use.
If it seems that I was about to be taken, that’s because I was. OMICS International is a leader in the growing business of academic publication fraud. It has created scores of “journals” that mimic the look and feel of traditional scholarly publications, but without the integrity. This year the Federal Trade Commission formally charged OMICS with “deceiving academics and researchers about the nature of its publications and hiding publication fees ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars.”
. . . .
OMICS is also in the less well-known business of what might be called conference fraud, which is what led to the call from John. Both schemes exploit a fundamental weakness of modern higher education: Academics need to publish in order to advance professionally, get better jobs or secure tenure. Even within the halls of respectable academia, the difference between legitimate and fake publications and conferences is far blurrier than scholars would like to admit.
. . . .
In October, a New Zealand college professor submitted a paper to the OMICS-sponsored “International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics,” which was held last month at the Hilton Atlanta Airport. It was written using the autocomplete feature on his iPhone, which produced an abstract that begins as follows: “Atomic Physics and I shall not have the same problem with a separate section for a very long long way. Nuclear weapons will not have to come out the same day after a long time of the year he added the two sides will have the two leaders to take the same way to bring up to their long ways of the same as they will have been a good place for a good time at home the united front and she is a great place for a good time.”
The paper was accepted within three hours.
An OMICS employee who identified himself as Sam Dsouza said conference papers are reviewed by its “experts” within 24 hours of submission. He couldn’t provide a list of its reviewers or their credentials.
Link to the rest at The New York Times
“Catch Me If You Can” comes to mind. The book was so much better than the movie. Frank would have made a killing scamming KU! 🙂
Heh, cold callers hate it when I tell them I don’t do those things over the phone, but that they are free to snail mail me the info to look over.
There has to be a novel in this somewhere, with a protagonist who buys papers to pass his courses at a diploma mill, publishes in scam journals and presents at fake conferences. And ends up as a science advisor to the government, only to find out that everybody else in the office has a similar resume.
Yes. Is there actually such a thing as real academia these days? At least outside the hard sciences, where fakery is more easily spotted?
I would hope the committees which review credentials for such things as tenure would know the difference between real and fake journals.
When I was in research, we had a list of maybe 7 publications which we were to keep up in, and publish in if possible.
Maybe biomedical areas are fuzzier, but that paper submitted, if read by an academic in the field, even cursorily, should have set off all kinds of warning bells.
The fraud risk is FOR something – an academic position, a government job, a position in industry – those destinations should be adept at separating the wheat from the drivel, and giving proper weight to obscure journals, if that is the preponderance of the articles claimed.
If they don’t do their due diligence on the receiving end, they are neglecting their job.
People who are committing fraud know perfectly well that’s what they’re doing. And it will come back to haunt them, such as the discovery that the ‘thesis’ supposedly written by the now President of Mexico was full of plagiarism.