Today in Poorly Targeted Scams

Scam conferences rarely miss the mark as throughly as this!

The Frontier Psychiatrists is a health themed publication. I’m on vacation, but still writing stuff, but poolside.

That will be a Spatial Video soon.

Scam conference and scam journals are a predation specific to the egos—and careers —of physicians and scientists. Today, I got an email encouraging me to join as a speaker at a “traditional medicine” conference. You know, where pseudoscience and grifters come together by pretending to pay homage to ancient something or other?

The seedy underbelly of these scam conferences has a David Foster Wallace should have been there quality:

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 on cancelled due to missing speakers, including Abe’s second presentation. He had, indeed, needed to catch that flight.

Everyone pays to play—in this case, present—which is also true at real conferences with actual standards and thousands of hours of professionals vetting and organizing the materials. I should know—I served on the committee that addresses the content for the AACAP annual meeting for several years.

There are some amusing items here for me, which is that the piece of my CV that they claim to have reviewed, because it was presented at last year's American Academy of child and adolescent psychiatry annual meeting, was a highly interactive workshop. There's no content to review. There is very little other than the title available online. You had to actually pay for a ticket to that ticket workshop to even get the slides. I know for damn sure they didn’t review that content.

This is the entertaining thing for me about scams, they can't be that good. The rate limiting factor on scams is that they have to be sort of bad in order to only select for the most credulous of respondents. Having a scam that's good enough to get me to fork over money to go to your conference is a nightmare for scam conference organizers. I'm a troublemaker. People who aren't content to just sit there? They might cause a fuss, or initiate a payment dispute with my credit card processor, or something. Scams want to only scam the most credulous—that's the gold rule of scamming. Can't be too good… because it increases the cost of actually running the intensive and labor heavy part of the scam. In this regard, running traditional medicine and integrative medicine conferences may be an awesome for scammers, because that's already so scammy to begin with.

Unfortunately, the real scam is academics. Because early career academics need to present, need to publish, and these conferences provide a way to do that:

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.

As much as scam conferences are a real scam, academics, and academic medicine, forces physicians and junior scientists to spend a lot of money to get their work out in the world. This is to allow a hope of a career. The predation is more vulture-y on the most junior. Junior scientists are the least able to resist by virtue of virtuous submissions getting accepted to real journals. Those journals themselves have open access fees in many cases.

Keep in mind, non-scam publishers? They are huge business:

Elsevier's brand is ranked #653 in the list of Global Top 1000 Brands, as rated by customers of Elsevier. Their current market cap is $47.90B.

One could argue that's just a more successful hustle. The reviewers aren't paid anything, the editors are rarely paid anything, the authors have to pay for open access, or libraries have to pay to access their work, etc.

Academics: if you squint, you can tell the difference between legitimate publishing and scam publishing.

But it's a lot of squinting.