I have my own personal list of fake conferences (or cleary “for profit” conferences, i.e. conferences where the organizers have as primary goal to make money regardless of the scientific aspect). I do my best to educate my team about how to identify these conferences but the most frequent asked question is a variant of ” but how can you say this is a bad conference if X, Y, and Z are in the PC?”
Clearly, they believe that the presence in the PC of “important” people legitimates the quality of the conference. I, of course, disagree since I know many reasons why people accept to be in a PC of a shady conference (for the younger ones, the wrong idea that the invitation is an honour that recognizes their value as researchers and a new good-looking line for their CV, for the senior ones, well they probably didn’t even look at the conference and just plan to pass on all the papers to review to junior colleagues 🙂 ) but I understand their point of view.
So please, make my life easier and do not legitimate fake conferences with your presence. Thanks!
