Tuesday, January 13, 2015

The Best Invitation Yet


Look at this fantastic invitation I received  to be an Editorial Board member of that prestigious scientific journal entitled Journal of Bioterrorism and Biosafety. I don't know how  many of these pseudo invitations to pseudo journals I and I am sure many other academics have received. However, this one wins the prize. It seems to be the form letter to be sent to everyone but someone forgot to fill out the "tokens". I am not sure even if the journals actually exist. They appear to be mainly from China and India. 


I also get an enormous number of  invitations to be a major speaker at scientific meetings in China. They usually mention an old publication of mine and frequently the field of the meeting has no relation to the paper or to my real field of research. The list of people who are speaking is impressive and frequently has some Nobel prize winners.The email writer's name is usually something like "Judy" and she has the chutzpah to complain that I have not responded to her previous emails of invitation. 

I read recently that someone actually submitted a paper for publication in one of these predatory journals (International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology) in which every sentence was "Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List". An anonymous reviewer actually rated it as "Excellent" and they requested a $150 fee for publication. I copy a portion of this paper together with  a "Figure" below:



Enough said.

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