For-profit conferences that masquerade as legitimate academic events but lack trusted selection and peer review processes are becoming more common. Here’s why that matters.

Thorough evaluation and expert peer review of research are at the core of academic and scientific integrity. When researchers attend a conference or cite a paper, they do so with confidence that these events and publications are operated in good faith and have undergone a trusted review process to ensure, as much as possible, that the content they distribute is sound. Scientists who present their work at these conferences similarly trust that doing so enhances, rather than detracts from, their professional reputations. Meanwhile, media outlets that report on conferences expect that not only do the proceedings offer fresh insights on new research, but also the research has been vetted for its methodology and significance.

These expectations and assumptions about the legitimacy of publications and events organized by well-intentioned, competent groups with genuine interest in advancing science were long safe. However, predatory journals began to appear in the early 2000s and have become more common over the past decade, signaling that there are unscrupulous organizations willing to push scientific integrity aside for the sake of profit. These journals offer researchers easy access to publishing, for a fee, while dismissing typical quality controls like rigorous peer review or checks for plagiarism.

Unfortunately, it is no longer safe to assume that a conference is genuine without doing proper background research into its organizers and sponsors.

More recently, there has been an increase in the occurrence of similarly predatory (or “fake”) conferences across numerous scientific disciplines, including in the Earth and space sciences. Unfortunately, it is no longer safe to assume that a conference is genuine without doing proper background research into its organizers and sponsors.