I wrote before about fake journals, or predatory publishers, which seems to be the term in use. An avid follower of this blog sent me an interesting email about a suspected fake conference. I’m attaching it here for you to judge.
Here we go.
"Elementary, My Dear Watson!"
The ICLLL 2015: XIII International Conference on Languages, Literature and Linguistics will be held in Oslo, Norway in July 17 - 18, 2015. The conference is organized by the World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology:
https://www.waset.org/conference/2015/07/oslo/ICLLL
The most peculiar feature of this site is that, as far as I could detect, there is not one single e-mail address in it. There is a funny list of International Conference Committees at:
https://www.waset.org/conference/2015/07/oslo/ICLLL/committees
However, checking several of the names there with a search engine seems to lead to nowhere.
In fact, there is an entry for the World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology at Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Academy_of_Science,_Engineering_and_Technology
The entry includes several comments such as: “This article is an orphan, as no other articles link to it,” and two whole sentences. The second sentence is:
“The academy has been listed as a "potential, possible, or probable" predatory publisher.“
The comment refers to Jeffrey Beall, Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers, Scholarly Open Access: Critical analysis of scholarly open-access publishing, dated 5 November 2013. Accessed 5 November 2013. (https://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/), which has already been referred to by Pablo in this blog.
Here’s an address of a blog run by an alert scholar:
https://adamchehouri.blogspot.fi/2014/03/waset-conference-is-fake.html
As Sherlock Holmes says: “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”
David
What say you?
Extra sad because it sounds like a cool conference theme.
Apparently, they also work really quickly, as the 17th conference takes place in Paris two days later.
ICLLL 2015 : 17th International Conference on Languages, Literature and Linguistics
Paris, France
July 20 – 21, 2015
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