Inside a “Fake” Conference: A Journey

Into Predatory Science

Article Published: July 11, 2019 | RJ Mackenzie

Credit: iStock

Contents

Finding fake science

A real event?

The case of the missing plenary

A disorganized committee

A new way for academic journals?

 The 48-hour peer review process

The predator’s trap

An academic conference can be the highlight of an early-career researcher’s

calendar. It presents a chance to share knowledge with like-minded scientists and
hear experts discuss the pressing topics in their field. Usually conferences are
tightly regulated operations, and fierce competition between attendees to get their
abstracts accepted into the agenda is common. But that’s not always the case.

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. 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.

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.

The message that kicked things off came from Zsuzsa Farkas, a Hungarian-born
neuroscience student, who studies at BPP University in the UK. She had been
looking forward to Conference Series LLC’s 4th International Congress on Addictive
Behavior and Dual Diagnosis. Speaking to TN, she expressed how she had been
“really excited” to book her place at the conference, which takes place September
5, 2019. Promising workshops, oral plenaries, keynote lectures, and a student
poster competition, the conference seemed to tick every box.

It was when Farkas first submitted her registration fee of £225 ($275) that things
started to feel wrong. Her payment was initially declined, so she gave Conference
Series a call. 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.

Eventually Farkas received a typo-filled email saying the company had received the
money. 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. 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. I feel very
disappointed and taken advantage of. I am a student, who has limited amount of
money, so I cannot just throw away £225 for nothing.”

Finding fake science

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. The court proceedings
revealed how OMICS had been engaging in several unethical publishing practices.
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.

But 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 company claims to arrange
thousands of conferences a year, on virtually every topic you could imagine –
aquaculture, glycobiology, recycling, high energy physics, midwifery. Could an
operation of this size really be predatory? What would one of these events actually
look like from the inside?

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. I couldn’t exactly pass up
the opportunity to get some answers, so I set out to find what really happens at a
predatory conference.

Continue reading below...

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A real event?

Edinburgh is no stranger to conferences. The city’s ancient skyline is quite the draw
for eventgoers, and there are a host of venues scattered across the UNESCO
heritage sites in the city’s Old and New Towns. The conference I was to attend was
being hosted at the Leonardo Hotel Murrayfield, quite far from the city center, in
the quiet suburban area of Clermiston.
When I arrived at the Leonardo, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. Would the
conference even go ahead? Farkas clearly felt that she had paid £225 for an event
that wasn’t even real, so I quickly went to the front desk to check the event was
actually happening. The concierge assured me that, yes, the conference was taking
place.

Reassured that I hadn’t had a wasted journey, I needed to address the small
matter of how I was going to get into the conference, given that I hadn’t been able
to get a press pass through the Conference Series website.

I went through to the conference lobby. Sure enough, there was a registration
area, although it appeared to have been hit by a mortar. Nametags and
registration documents were scattered around a desk in disorganized piles, with
just one young staff member manning the booth. I asked her if I would be able to
get into the conference as press. I didn’t have any identification beyond my
business card, but she waved me through, to a room with about 50 attendees.

Farkas may have been worried about having paid money for a non-existent event,
but this was very much a real conference, with a full speaker schedule, including a
keynote. Quite a renowned keynote, as it happened, as Professor Koji Abe, of
Okayama University in Japan, stood up.

Abe is an influential figure in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) research, having

helped popularize the use of edavarone, one of the few promising drugs with
therapeutic potential in the field. He was listed in the program as giving not just
one but two lectures. Perhaps Farkas’s skepticism had been misplaced. After Abe
had finished his plenary, however, things started to get a little weird.

The case of the missing plenary

Abe was given an official Conference Series certificate, took a quick photo, and
then speedily left the room, muttering something about needing to catch a flight.
Some confused glances were exchanged in the audience at this, as there were just
two hours until Abe’s next talk was scheduled.

It was to be somewhat less than two hours, in fact, as the next plenary speaker,
Tofael Hossain Bhuiyan, a clinician at Rangpur Medical College Hospital in
Bangladesh, didn’t come up to speak when his name was called by the session
chair. He was nowhere to be found. The explanation for this was quite literally that
he had “gone missing.” It was at this point that I realized this wasn’t going to be
your typical conference.

The morning’s talks proceeded at pace, with speakers touching on a dizzying array
of topics. Variety in a conference schedule isn’t unusual, but there was almost no
organization or theme to the talks. Neurology case studies were followed by in-
depth presentations on basic neuroscience. Clearly, the “23rd International
Conference on Neurology & Neurophysiology” and “24th International Conference
on Neurosurgery & Neuroscience” had been simply smashed together to create a
loosely connected talk series that was baffling to attendees.

I spoke to one fellow conference-goer, Francesca Morelli, a clinician who was then
studying at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands. “When I looked at the
agenda for the first time, I noticed the program was heterogeneous, there were so
many different topics," said Morelli. "I really didn’t get what the educational value
of the whole conference could have been.” But by the time she saw the formal
agenda, Morelli, eager to present at an international conference, had her poster
accepted into the agenda. For a fee, of course.

This sense of the surreal was heightened by the organizers’ seeming disregard for
the agenda. With an entire keynote speaker missing, we reached the intended
lunchbreak at about 10am. Rather than have a break for discussion, the
conference just plowed on, meaning we were given a talk scheduled for 3.50 pm at
around midday. Of the nine talks after Abe’s that I stayed for, four were cancelled
due to missing speakers, including Abe’s second presentation. He had, indeed,
needed to catch that flight.

As the mishmash of presentations broke for lunch, I used the opportunity to quiz
the session chair, Ludmila Zylinska, who was from the University of Lodz in Poland.
She explained to me that she had originally been booked as a speaker, before
being asked to become the session moderator at the last minute. She didn’t know
who many of the speakers in her session were. She told me that around a third of
the two-day event’s speaker lineup had not arrived. Zylinska wasn’t affiliated with
Conference Series, and the only representative from the company, it seemed, was
the administrator who had let me in at the door.

A disorganized committee

No clearer on how the event took shape or who was running it, I tracked down a
researcher I recognized from the conference website, a member of the conference
organizing committee. This was Felix-Martin Werner, a researcher at Euro
Akademie Pößneck in Germany. Unlike Zylinska, Werner readily admitted having
worked with both Conference Series and OMICS in the past. Werner said that,
despite being on the organizing committee, he had had nothing to do with picking
the speaker lineup, this was pre-decided by Conference Series.

What about the other committee members? One was a professor at the Karolinska
Institute in Sweden, whom I managed to reach in a phone call I made in the lunch
break. He informed me that he was unable to attend the conference, as he was
sick. Another member of the committee emailed me saying he was getting married
in Brazil. The fourth member was unreachable.

I had a quick chat with some conference attendees sitting in the hotel lobby. They
had traveled from the Philippines to attend, spending thousands of pounds on
flights in the process. They seemed to have enjoyed the morning’s talks but said
they were disappointed that some speakers had not turned up. Morelli echoed this
sentiment, and raised concerns about the conference’s organization, “The general
discussion after the lectures was poor. At other conferences I have attended, the
chair can lead the discussion, or ask critical questions about the lectures, and that
is what I have missed.”

I decided I had seen enough, but as I prepared to leave, I caught up with Werner
again to ask how he had gotten involved with OMICS. He spoke with surprising
frankness about how he had been offered the editorship of one of their journals,
the Journal of Cytology & Histology. He told me that in his position as editor, he had
reviewed more than 30 papers, but due to OMICS’s struggle to get reliable
reviewers, had had to review a number of papers he had limited understanding of.

The journal has a publication fee of €1100 per paper. Werner brightly told me that
he received a reduced rate for publishing in his own journal. My surprise at this
state of affairs must have told on my face, as he sought to explain that other,
eminent scientists were involved with the journal and that, despite its problems, it
had some stature. He mentioned that his co-editor was George Perry, a Professor
at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Perry is also the editor of the Journal of
Alzheimer’s Disease, one of the most respected publications in the field. Why was a
respected neuroscientist registered as the editor of a predatory journal? I realized
that the links between predatory conferences and predatory publishing might be
stronger than I had first thought, and resolved to find out how OMICS had
managed to convince so many researchers with their events and journals.

A new way for academic journals?

“I wanted to make a difference in the way they ran the journal. I’m an experienced
editor and I wanted to make an impact on the publication’s quality,” George Perry
tells me, after I get hold of him a couple of weeks after the conference. He explains
that OMICS reached out to him some years back, asking if he would be able to take
up an editorial position. Perry saw OMICS’ open-access model as a different way
for researchers to approach publishing: “I was really intrigued by the open-access
model because I thought it was going to change the way journals function. Now,
I’m not so sure.”

Perry tells me he repeatedly raised his concerns about OMICS’ editorial process,
even threatening to resign his editorship if changes weren’t made. At first, that
worked, and practices were altered, sometimes overnight, says Perry, especially
when he talked directly to OMICS founder and CEO, Srinababu Gedela (Gedela did
not respond to requests for comment for this article). Over time, however, OMICS
employees stopped responding. “They’re not terribly capable people,” Perry tells
me. Eventually, he had had enough. “I can tell you it’s extremely difficult to resign
from them. I tried to resign a number of times.” Perry tells me he has never met
Werner, and that he has completely lost faith in what he initially thought were
OMICS’ good intentions: “I don’t feel that they have a commitment to moving
forward. I did feel that years ago. That’s why I stayed with them. I felt that very
strongly because I really was intending to change the picture of that publication. I
thought that the information flow in science was going to change.”

The 48-hour peer review process

I reach back out to Morelli, now back at home in Italy. I’m keen to hear how the
second day of the conference went. Suffice to say, not much better. “When I was
showing my poster, the colleagues who were supposed to judge them did not look
so keen to ask critical questions. The whole thing didn’t appear very professional,”
she says.

After the conference, Morelli found that the email address she had used to register
was being spammed with messages asking for article submissions to OMICS
journals, promising that her submissions would be reviewed in just two days.
“That’s an impossible timeframe to get proper peer review,” says Morelli “This
opportunity can be appealing for young researchers, who need to publish. There is
some real pressure behind it”.
The predator’s trap

Predatory science, be it in the form of journals or conferences, sounds easy to

avoid on the surface; a less-than-honest operation that can be simply outsmarted.
However, after talking with the conference attendees and Perry, I was left with the
realization that predatory organizations are smarter than they may first appear.
Their habit of preying on early-career researchers works because they are pushed
into attending and showing off their work at conferences by the present-or-perish
system. This is only complicated when predatory conference companies advertise
talks that aren’t there, or poster competitions that merely go through the motions.

Morelli says that it’s not straightforward to judge the quality of a conference before
attending it, but she won’t ever attend another Conference Series meeting.

Perry’s situation shows that even respected, veteran scientists can be exploited by
predatory outfits, who squeeze them for every drop of money or credibility they
can. Morelli believes that more needs to be done to get the word out about
predatory science to researchers at every level, be it senior scientists, early-career
researchers, or even students like Farkas. “I think it’s a fraud, actually. I strongly
believe that the scientific community should discourage students, doctors, and
researchers in general from attending these conferences. We need a blacklist of
conferences that we can’t trust. I hope people will open their eyes and be more
aware of the problem.”

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you. Contact us here.

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