Perhaps somewhat serendipitously, I saw that, just a short drive from my home, Conference Series was hosting the “ 23rd International Conference on Neurology & Neurophysiology” alongside the “ 24th International Conference on Neurosurgery & Neuroscience” at a hotel in Scotland’s capital, Edinburgh. Could an operation of this size really be predatory? What would one of these events actually look like from the inside? The company claims to arrange thousands of conferences a year, on virtually every topic you could imagine – aquaculture, glycobiology, recycling, high energy physics, midwifery. ![]() These included making up its own version of the widely accepted Impact Factor journal rating system when Thomson Reuters excluded OMICS journals and tricking reputable scientists into being editors on their journals.īut what struck me about Farkas’s story is that, without any clear link on the Conference Series website connecting them to OMICS, it would be easy to think they were offering a typical conference package. The court proceedings revealed how OMICS had been engaging in several unethical publishing practices. Sadly for Farkas, if she had waited just a few more weeks to book her place, she might have seen the announcement that the US Federal Trade Commission had been awarded $50 million in a lawsuit against OMICS. I am a student, who has limited amount of money, so I cannot just throw away £225 for nothing.” I feel very disappointed and taken advantage of. For Farkas, who, as of July 2019, has been unable to retrieve her payment, this was more significant than feeling tricked: “I am not working at the moment and study 4-6 hours a day, 5-6 days a week. ![]() By this point she had looked up Conference Series online, and realized that its parent company, Hyderabad, India-based OMICS International, was renowned as a predatory publisher. Eventually Farkas received a typo-filled email saying the company had received the money. A man called “Sam” picked up, who told her that the payment hadn’t gone through, but an inquiry with her bank suggested the money had been taken out of her account. Her payment was initially declined, so she gave Conference Series a call. It was when Farkas first submitted her registration fee of £225 ($275) that things started to feel wrong. Promising workshops, oral plenaries, keynote lectures, and a student poster competition, the conference seemed to tick every box. Speaking to TN, she expressed how she had been “really excited” to book her place at the conference, which takes place September 5, 2019. ![]() She had been looking forward to Conference Series LLC’s 4th International Congress on Addictive Behavior and Dual Diagnosis. The message that kicked things off came from Zsuzsa Farkas, a Hungarian-born neuroscience student, who studies at BPP University in the UK. Our chance investigation started after a message from a stranger took me inside a predatory conference and has uncovered how predatory science has ensnared scientists at every level and made a small fortune for the conference organizers. These are "predatory conferences", named after the more well-known sister industry of " predatory publishing", where typically open-access model publications accept submissions without a proper peer review process, but with a steep publication price. There is a growing underbelly of conferences that might walk and talk like the real thing but have none of the editorial standards expected by academics and have developed a reputation for advertising with fake agendas and high prices. Usually conferences are tightly regulated operations, and fierce competition between attendees to get their abstracts accepted into the agenda is common. It presents a chance to share knowledge with like-minded scientists and hear experts discuss the pressing topics in their field. ![]() An academic conference can be the highlight of an early-career researcher’s calendar.
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