Have you ever received invitations to write reviews, or edit a special issue for journals that you have never heard of before? Or have you ever been invited to chair a session at a new conference within your field, because you are such an expert? Even sometimes in area that are not at all your expertise?

Well, most of us have and some of us can receive a dozen of those in a week. For the young scientist in early career, it can be easy to be fooled by those invitations the first time they received them. It is of course flattering for any scientist to be invited for a talk or a session. Like it happened to us this week.

Be aware of those so called “predatory conferences”: You are invited to chair and speak, but you still have to pay a high fee. Apparently, most of those conferences still take place, but none of the key speakers advertise are there, since they never agreed in the first place. You end up in a conference with a couple of people that have been fooled like you for a high price.

Similarly, “predatory journals” can scam you into writing an article for them, which they will eventually publish without any peer-review and no edition (you do it yourself), and you have to pay for all publication costs. It’s a lose-lose situation, since in addition you will never get any citations for that!

So be aware, don’t fall for those scams, and in case of doubt, ask around.

If you want to read more about this, here are two recent articles:

http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2016/11/dubious-conferences-put-pose-symposium
http://www.nature.com/news/predatory-journals-recruit-fake-editor-1.21662

One is about predatory conferences and why you should not answer to them. The other is about predatory journals, which had no problems employing Dr. “Fraud” as their new editor!

Stephanie Le Hellard