What is it like to attend a predatory conference?
What is it like to attend a predatory conference?
Nature sent a reporter to find out as part of an investigation into dud events.
One positive from the pandemic was the realization that in-person conferences are almost always a waste of time and money.
If an online conference goes sideways, it’s easy enough to close the browser and carry on.
In-person meetings too. My company used to fly people across the country for one-day meetings. In a shocking revelation, that turned out to be unnecessary when the pandemic forced most meetings to be virtual.
Great gods. I don’t even drive across town for staff meetings. There’s always a video call alternative, and about half our personnel use it.
I like them because so long as it's paid for by work it's just a paid vacation, you don't really need to attend anything, just go to some museums, use your allowance to get some food. Nobody asks questions.
I like in-person conferences. Online ones are okay for just giving/watching presentations, but you miss out on the random interactions with others in your field.
Ugh. I don’t go to conferences to socialize. I realize that many people do, but I don’t think that’s an appropriate use of institutional resources.
I kinda disagree. Even though I absolute loath the networking part of conferences, I came to hate online conferences even more. Listening to researchers with terrible microphones (because who is going to spend money on it if you use it once in a blue moon) is really not worth it.
Poster sessions are even worse. I was sitting in my private zoom call to present my poster, one or two persons dropped in, didn't react when I asked if I should give them the spiel, and then just left.
Online conferences for me concentrate all of the negative aspects with none of the fun parts.I haven’t experienced mics bad enough to make me wish I were there in person. And I haven’t had that experience in any online poster hall, but maybe I just got lucky?
I get so aggressively spammed with this shit that I have deleted legitimate invited talks at real conferences
I'm also wondering whether I refused to respond to legitimate demands as well... But, well, let's say that if you phrase your demands like predatory journals/confs do, you should expect some silent treatments from academia...
Academic publishers pointing at even bigger scammers, saying "See? They're the REAL bad guys!"
How does one get into a situation where they attend a predatory conference? Isn’t it not that difficult to know what the big conferences are in your field?
My guess is they’re cheaper and there’s just so much pressure to add more things to your CV. “Publish or perish” as the also-predatory and exploitative Academy says.
I guess it only requires a few "recommendable" people to get lured into those conferences just because the occasion made them lower their guard (like Loren in the article). Add to that some people just fake-attending for the CV or the occasion to travel to touristy destination, and you can make quite a few bucks for a relatively low investment, I guess? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In my experience, there are some niche conferences that have no name recognition, but are amazing. A lot of people haven’t heard of the Gordon conferences, and some of the other top ones in my field are open source package user group meetings and company hosted conferences, which could easily appear low-value at first glance.
The 10K+ attendee conferences have lots of name recognition, but I found them to be effectively useless for accomplishing any goal (they’re not even that great for networking), and they could easily be a series of recordings for what you get.
So, I think it’s reasonable for folks to roll the dice on some conferences, because some of them are really hidden gems (and if they suck you can always audible it to a free vacation).
Wow, responding to a spam email is one thing but...:-)
Are you talking about the RNC?