Key points

• 1,280 spam emails were received during a 5-year period starting with the first conference attendance—no emails were received until this point in the author’s career.
• Spam emails from potentially predatory journals and conferences can be directly related to academic activity—conference attendance and publications.
• The 990 spam emails from journals came from 111 publishers, of which 22 were from the State of Delaware (USA), with 6 publishers providing the same postal address.
• Requests to unsubscribe from unsolicited emails have some success, but is limited since there is little action that can be taken against the publishers or journals.

Abstract

Predatory publishers—those who do not adhere to rigorous standards of academic practice such as peer review—are increasingly infiltrating biomedical databases, to the detriment of the wider scientific community. These publishers frequently send unsolicited ‘spam’ emails to generate submission to their journals, with early career researchers (ECR) particularly susceptible to these practices because of pressures such as securing employment and promotion. This analysis sought to record and characterize the emails received over the course of a PhD and post-doctoral position (~8 years), as well as attempts to unsubscribe from such emails, using a progressive and step-wise manner. A total of 1,280 emails identified as academic spam were received (990 journal invitations, 220 conference invitations, 70 ‘other’). The first email was received 3 months after registration for an international conference. Attempts at unsubscribing were somewhat effective, whereby implications of reporting to respective authorities resulted in a 43% decrease in emails, although did not eliminate them completely, and therefore alternative approaches to eliminating academic spam may be needed. Ongoing education about predatory publishers, as well as action by key academic stakeholders, should look to reduce the impact these predatory publishers have upon the wider literature base.

Tomlinson, O.W. (2022), Analysis of predatory emails in early career academia and attempts at prevention. Learned Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1500
Publisher (Open Access): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/leap.1500