Academic conferences and journals are important institutions. It’s a serious matter for them to be corrupted. And many unscrupulous operators are actively working to corrupt both.
Most of the problem is rooted in Asia. India is home to a large percentage of the world’s junk journals (because of the unwise decision of its University Grants Commission to require a certain number of publications for promotion or even submission of a Ph.D. dissertation). And in China a gigantic higher-education industry (2,236 colleges and universities enrolling over 20 million students and employing millions of teaching and research staff) is served by commercial organizations that have sprung up to feed its hunger for conferences and journals (see e.g. this report).
Almost every day I get invitations to submit to some junk journal, or join an editorial board, or attend one of the unrefereed multidisciplinary megameetings sometimes known as spamferences. And I’m only seeing the invitations that manage to evade all my spam filtering.
Recently I was invited to appear at World Education Day. It looks bigger and more respectable than most spamferences (though its theme — “Opening, Sharing, Smartness” — sounds as if it was crafted by a random conference-theme-generation algorithm). The people charged with whipping up attendance, however, are spammers. To avoid being caught by spam filters they carefully personalize recipient names (“Dear Dr. Geoffrey K. Pullum”) and use a rotating roster of fake Western female sender names.
My invitation, giving a postal address in the Dalian High-Tech Industrial Zone in Liaoning Province, came with sender’s real name shown as Gemma, but her email address was elaine@gene-congress.com, and the message was signed by Linda Yang.
The subject header began with “Confirmation” (though it was not confirming anything) and the text began: “I’m writing to follow-up my last invitation as below, would you please give me a tentative reply?” This was wholly dishonest: No message was appended, and no prior invitation had been sent (I checked the spam folder).
A follow-up with the same text four days later was again from “Gemma,” but this time (in case I had blocked the first sender address) her email was janet@gene-congress.com, and the message was signed by Grace Yang (Linda’s sister, maybe?).
High turnover. Gemma, Elaine, Linda, Janet, and Grace must find it hard to get their work done between all the recruitment interviews and leaving parties. But how do I know they are not conveying a sincere invitation? Because they invite me “to be the chair/speaker at Session 2-1: New Leadership in Education while presenting about On the Mathematical Foundations of Syntactic Structures.”
Their suggested presentation title comes from a paper of mine from 2011 (Journal of Logic, Language and Information 20, 277–296). It grew out of an invited talk at a mathematical-linguistics meeting marking the 50th anniversary of Noam Chomsky’s earliest book publication, Syntactic Structures (1957). It could appeal only to a mathematically-minded person with a strong interest in the early history of transformational-generative syntactic theory. Maybe a hundred specialists worldwide. Its topic is light-years away from leadership in education.
So why did they focus on that paper? I think I know the answer. They have borrowed another academic spamster’s database, in effect a long lists of triples〈X, Y, Z 〉where X is the name of a scholar with email address Y who has published a paper entitled Z. A spambot can use such a database, sending a message to each Y saying something like: “Dear Professor X, we have read your very interesting paper Z ... " — and then go on with some boilerplate flattery to try and seduce them into contributing or attending or whatever. In 2017 I received a message saying:
After careful evaluation and reading your article published in Journal of Logic, Language and Information entitled “On the Mathematical Foundations of”, we decided to send you this invitation.
A glitch in the database access had sliced off the crucial last two words of the article title. They didn’t notice (or didn’t care), but proceeded blithely:
In light of your remarkable achievements in Critical Care, we would like to invite you to join the Editorial Board of Journal of Nursing.
In an unprecedented triumph of interdisciplinarity, my paper about the history of transformational grammar has qualified me as an expert in critical-care nursing.
I could cite hundreds of similarly absurd spam approaches. They flock in, day after day. You could say it doesn’t matter, it’s just harmless spam. But I see it as well-poisoning, budget-draining, infosphere pollution. Every dollar of anybody’s money that is wasted on page charges or subscription dues for rubbish journals, or attending spamferences, is a dollar too much. And the persistence of efforts from commercial entities appears to suggest that their efforts do have some success: Some misguided academics are taking the bait.