Where (and Where Not) to Publish Your Work

Criteria to Identify Predatory Conferences

Criteria for identifying predatory conferences is similar to that for journals.

Below is the criteria from Think. Check. Attend.

Organizers & Sponsors

• Are you aware of the society or the association organizing this conference?
• Can you easily identify the venue of the conference?
• Is it the first time that this conference is being held?
• Have you or your colleagues attended this conference before?
• Is it clear what fees will be charged (conference fee, registration fees, …, etc.) and would these be waived if you are accepted as a speaker?
• Are any of the sponsors involved in the conference?
• Are you aware of any of them, especially with industry-related fields such as Engineering & Biomedical research?
• Did you check the conference website? Is all the information (such as the attendance fees, submission date, conference date, editorial committee, program details and venue) presented in a proper way?
• Have you read any papers from this conference proceedings before?

Agenda & Editorial Committee

• Is there a clear information about the timeline and the agenda for the conference?
• Do the scope and objectives of the conference fit your field and core interest or not?
• Have you heard of the Keynote speakers?
• Is the Editorial Committee listed on the website?
• Have you heard of the Editorial Committee members before?
• Is the Committee clear about the editorial control over presentations and the type of peer-review it uses?

Conference Proceedings

• Is the Organizing Committee clear about where the proceedings will be published?
• Does the conference make it clear which indexing services it can guarantee the published proceedings and to which indexers will it submit the proceedings for evaluation?
• Is the publisher of the proceedings a member of a recognized industry initiative such as COPE, DOAJ, OASPA?
• Also refer to Think. Check. Submit. check list for more details about publishing in the right journal at https://thinkchecksubmit.org/check/.

More criteria from AuthorAID:  What are ‘predatory’ conferences and how can I avoid them?

Read this 2016 Science article by Adam Ruben -- Dubious conferences put the ‘pose’ in ‘symposium’ -- to learn more about how predatory conferences work.

• Think. Check. Attend. 

  An international initiative, introduced by Knowledge E, that aims to guide and assist researchers and scholars when choosing trusted conferences to attend and to present their research.

• Flaky Academic Conferences 

  This blog is an offshoot of Forensic Science, Statistics & the Law. Two of the most popular postings were lists of flaky academic journals and conferences and correspondence with the staff operating some of them. The criteria for inclusion on the lists are unsolicited email to me (spam), indications of shady practices or possible incompetence in the subject areas, and reports on other websites. The burgeoning length of the lists and supporting information made them unwieldy, so I decided they merited separate blogs that could be more readily updated and searched.

• Beall's List of Publishers 

  Beall's List of publishers includes journal and conference publishers. "This is an archived version of the Beall's list - a list of potential predatory publishers created by a librarian Jeffrey Beall. We will only update links and add notes to this list."

• Questionable Conferences 

  List of questionable conferences compiled by Dana Roth, librarian at Caltech Library.

• Conference Alert 

  Conference alert websites allow predatory publishers to post their conferences.