Img Source: canva.com

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve received several emails informing me about two scholarly publishers/conference organizers and their intentional use of duplicate or nearly-duplicate journal titles and conference names.

A bogus conference with a duplicate name designed to trick people.

One of the most prolific conference-name copiers is WASET, the so-called World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology that is not really an academy at all. In the image above, we see that WASET is holding a conference next year in Chicago, the International Conference on Traffic and Transport Psychology (ICTTP). They’re also holding an earlier version of the bogus conference next month in Osaka.

The authentic conference.

The real International Conference on Traffic and Transport Psychology will be held next year in Brisbane, Qld., Australia, and the conference only takes place every five years. It’s organized by the Centre for Accident Research & Road Safety — Queensland. If this is your field, I recommend that you completely ignore the WASET and head to Brisbane instead.

More OMICS Group Copying

OMICS Group, a predatory publisher from Hyderabad, India, likes to copy or closely copy journal titles to trick researchers into thinking their low-quality knock-off is the real thing. Here are two examples.

Insight Medical Publishing, also known as iMedPub, is a trashy imprint or brand now owned by OMICS Group. They’re currently launching a new title, the Journal of Clinical Epigenetics. Their spam email refers to it only as Clinical Epigenetics at times, a tactic to fool people into believing the spam is for Clinical Epigenetics, the official journal of the Clinical Epigenetics Society, and now published by BioMed Central.

The legitimate journal.

Taylor & Francis publishes the Journal of Dual Diagnosis, and OMICS Group has also ripped off this title. Again, their ImedPub imprint publishes the copycat journal Dual Diagnosis: Open Access.

OMICS Group rubbish.

OMICS Group is also organizing a conference called Dual Diagnosis, and the spam email for that conference is signed by a person with a familiar name:

Bad choice for a fake name.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2015 at 9:00 AM and is filed under AustraliaScholarly Open-Access PublishersUnethical Practices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.